A new technique developed by researchers at MIT uses shock waves to remove radioactive contaminants from nuclear reactor wastewater.

Called shock electrodialysis, the cleansing process separates waste products from the power plant's coolant system for disposal, while the water can be recycled instead of replaced. //

Originally invented to remove salt from seawater, the process uses a deionization shockwave in a tube of water to push electrically charged ions into a charged porous material that acts as the tube's lining. The upshot of this is that, if the ions consist of the desired element for disposal, they can be selectively filtered out of the coolant water flow, which can amount to 10 million cubic meters of water per year for a large reactor. //

So far, the technique has been used to remove 99.5 percent of the radioactive cobalt and cesium from simulated wastewater that also contains boric acid and lithium, which are left behind. This means that up to two-thirds of the water can be recycled. The process is scalable and MIT says that it can not only be used to clean reactor cooling systems, but also for large-scale applications like removing lead from drinking water. //

The research paper, which was authored by professor of chemical engineering at MIT Martin Bazant, graduate students Mohammad Alkhadra Huanhuan Tian and postdocs Kameron Conforti and Tao Gao, is published in Environmental Science and Technology.