Bela Liptak has extensively discussed the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, and as I’ve mentioned in the past, it’s evoked my curiosity about these events, but also astonished me that we’re still not done cleaning them up.
Not all too long ago, I shared a TechXplore.com article by Karyn Nishimura, which explained the challenges plant operators at Fukushima face in managing the ever-increasing amounts of contaminated water at the site. But, it isn’t only plant operators at these accident areas who are dealing with managing nuclear waste.
Depleted uranium is a radioactive by-product of the process that’s expensive to store and manage. However, researchers at the University of Sussex say that using a catalyst containing depleted uranium, they converted ethylene into ethane, according to a University of Sussex news item by Stephanie Allen titled “Unused stockpiles of nuclear waste could be more useful than we might think, according to a new study.”
Allen explains that working with researchers from Universite de Toulouse and Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, the team found that an organometallic molecule based on depleted uranium can catalyze the addition of a molecule of hydrogen to the carbon-carbon double bond in ethylene.
“The ability to convert alkenes into alkanes is an important chemical reaction that means we may be able to take simple molecules and upgrade them into valuable commodity chemicals, like hydrogenated oils and petrochemicals, which can be used as an energy source,” Professor Richard Layfield, University of Sussex, said in a statement. “The fact that we can use depleted uranium to do this provides proof that we don’t need to be afraid of it as it might actually be very useful for us.”
Professor Cloke added: “Nobody has thought to use DU in this way before. While converting ethylene into ethane is nothing new, the use of uranium is a key milestone. The key to the reactivity were two fused pentagonal rings of carbon, known as pentalene, which help the uranium to inject electrons into ethylene and activate it towards addition of hydrogen.”
The research was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, authored by University of Sussex professors Layfield, Geoff Cloke and Dr. Nikolas Tsoureas.
