Tuesday, 18 March 2025 / Edition 50

A reader recently pointed out that it can be easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of new technology without paying proper attention to the waste, byproducts, or results the tech creates. An excellent point, and it turns out that waste removal demand creates even further opportunity for companies to innovate.

So, this week, we are going to look at two companies hoping to address needs in the waste disposal space. Both are deploying three-step processes to remove nuclear and plastic wastes, respectively.

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Stabilizing Nuclear Waste

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Scenes of yellow barrels with the ominous nuclear waste symbol are abundant in futuristic movies, highlighting the importance of safe waste disposal in nuclear energy.

What is it: Nuclear waste spans more than just spent fuel. Technically, any material exposed to nuclear radiation, including PPE or tools, must also be safely stored and disposed.

What’s new: “Recycling” is generally not a term we associate with nuclear waste, but technology and innovation are changing that.

Canadian company Moltex has been exploring ways to recycle transuranic elements—elements with an atomic number greater than 92, not found in nature, and radioactively unstable.

The company recycles these elements from large commercial nuclear power plants in a four-stage process called Waste to Stable Salt (WATSS). WATSS can extract 90 percent of transuranic material in 24 hours, with greater efficiency over longer periods of time.

• The first step harkens back to your high school chemistry days with a redox reaction, i.e. oxidation-reduction.

• Transuranic elements are then separated from uranium, as they dissolve into molten salt. The uranium remains insoluble.

• The molten salt from the extracted transuranic elements has the fission products removed.

• That removal refines it even further into a final salt mixture that can be adjusted to either chloride- or fluoride-based salts, depending on a receiving reactor’s specific needs.

Driving the news: A few weeks ago, Moltex announced that it successfully validated WATSS on used fuel bundles from a commercial reactor through hot cell experiments executed by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories.

Go deeper: Learn more about Moltex here and here.

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Recycling Plastics

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Speaking of waste…given the lack of plastic substitutes, it behooves us to find better ways to recycle plastic.

Recently, a team from Northwestern University discovered a way to use the ultimate solvent—water—to recycle plastic.

The problem: Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastics make up roughly 12 percent of all plastics globally and cause a build-up of micro and nano plastics that seep into water sources, accumulate in the natural environment, and have been found inside nearly every human organ.

These researchers use a three-step process to convert PET into reusable materials with a 94-percent recovery in four hours.

1. They combine PET with a low-cost molybdenum catalyst and activated carbon. This first step reminds me of how we combined our rock powders with what we called a flux to facilitate melting at lower temperatures than would otherwise be required.

2. They break down the PET’s molecular bonds by heating that mixture.

3. The fragmented PETs are exposed to ambient air, which naturally has a minimal amount of water vapor that triggers a conversion of those fragments into monomers known as terephthalic acid (TPA). TPA is a valuable precursor for making new polymers.

Advantages of this method:

• Absence of chemical solvents

• High recovery rate in a short time

• Easily removable byproducts

• Works with mixed and colored plastics by selectively targeting polyester materials

Though the process requires moisture from the ambient air, the researchers note that even dry air will have enough water, since the atmosphere generally contains between 10,000 and 15,000 cubic kilometers of water.

Next steps: There are a few ways geoscientists could help as the company scales to industrial settings, including optimizing for temperature, catalyst concentration, and further decreasing reaction time.

For more information, look here, and here is the published paper.

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.