Organism's
ability to distinguish strontium from calcium could help in dealing with
nuclear waste.
Strontium, it does not touch plutonium, radio active iodine, or the other elements on the ground, in the water table, and in the ocean near the reactor. This is a great discovery no doubt, but it is not even close to an answer to clean up radio active sites.
30 March 2011
Radio Active Strontium-eating algae.
CLAUDE NURIDSANY & MARIE PERENNOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Common
freshwater algae might hold a key to cleaning up after disasters such as
The
algae, called Closterium moniliferum, are members of the desmid order, known to microbiologists for their
distinctive shapes, said Minna Krejci,
a materials scientist at
Strontium is very similar
in properties and atomic size to calcium, so biological processes can't easily
separate the two elements. That makes strontium-90 a particularly dangerous
isotope: it can infiltrate milk, bones, bone marrow, blood and other tissues,
where the radiation that it emits can eventually cause cancer.
"That's
what makes strontium-90 one of the dominant health risks of spent fuel for the
first 100 years or so after it leaves the reactor," says Krejci. The radioisotope has a half-life of about 30 years.
Unfortunately,
reactor waste and accidental spills can contain up to ten billion times more
calcium than strontium, making it very difficult to clean up the strontium
without also having to dispose of a mountain of harmless calcium. "We need
a highly efficient and selective method of separating it," says Krejci.
Enter C. moniliferum. The organism has no
particular interest in strontium: it mostly collects barium. But strontium is
midway between calcium and barium in size and properties, so any of it that
happens to be around gets crystallized as well. Meanwhile, even though calcium
is far more abundant than either of the other two elements, it is different
enough to barium that it gets left behind.
The
result is a crystal that is mainly composed of barium, but is massively
enriched in strontium.
Much of Krejci's research so far1 has focused on trying to work out how
the algae generate the crystals, with an eye to making the process even more
strontium-selective. For the moment, she knows that the organism isn't
purposefully bringing excess barium and strontium through its cell walls.
Rather, she says, the crystals appear to form because the vacuoles in which
they collect are rich in sulphate. Barium and
strontium have relatively low solubility in sulphate
solutions, so any barium and strontium that make their way into these vacuoles
easily precipitate out to form crystals.
Microbiologists
don't know whether the crystals have any function for the organism. Perhaps
they are simply waste, forming by accident in vacuoles that serve as storage
depots for sulphate, said Krejci.
Whatever
purpose the crystals serve, Krejci's research has
found that it is possible to enhance the uptake of strontium by tailoring the
amount of barium in the algae's environment. This, she says, means that it
might prove possible to seed nuclear waste, or a spill of radioactive material,
with barium to encourage the algae to grab the strontium — easy to do, she
says, because "it would only be a small amount" of barium.
It might
also be possible to improve the process by tinkering with sulphate
levels in the environment, thereby changing the amount of sulphate
in the vacuoles. "Once we learn about how the cells respond to conditions,
we can think of more elegant ways to manipulate them," says Krejci.
Once isolated
by the algae, the strontium could be sequestered in high-level nuclear waste
repositories, while the rest of the waste could go to a less expensive
lower-level repository, saving space and money. Currently, Krejci
says, there are hundreds of millions of litres of
stored nuclear waste in the
Krejci and her colleagues have not yet tested how well the
algae survive in the presence of radioactivity. But even if the organisms
respond poorly, she says, they would probably live long enough to start
removing strontium, because the process begins quickly. "The cells
precipitate crystals within 30 minutes to an hour," she says. And if more
are needed, "they are easy to culture".
Gija Geme, a chemist at the
"It's
a hot topic right now," says Geme. "But
when I put this symposium together, there was no tragedy [in
Geme urges Krejci's team not to
spend too much time trying to discover precisely why the algae does what it
does before they start testing the process with nuclear wastes.
"Sometimes,
just getting it out is very, very important," she says. "I would like
to see field studies using actual waste as soon as possible."