Venus Flytrap for Nuclear Waste

Not every object is food to a Venus flytrap. Like the carnivorous plant, a new material developed at Northwestern University permanently traps only its desired prey, the radioactive ion cesium, and not other harmless ions like sodium.

The results are published online by the journal Nature Chemistry.
"Ideally we want to concentrate the radioactive material so it can be dealt with properly and the nonradioactive water thrown away," said Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and the paper's senior author. "A new class of materials that takes advantage of the flytrap mechanism could lead to a much-needed breakthrough in nuclear waste remediation."

Capturing only cesium from vast amounts of liquid nuclear waste is like looking for a needle in a haystack, Kanatzidis said. The waste has a much higher concentration of sodium compared to cesium, with ratios as great as 1,000-to-1. This difficult-to-achieve selectivity is why currently there is no good solution for cesium removal.

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