New method sought for nuclear waste disposal

POCATELLO (AP) - Researchers at Idaho State University hope to develop a method for destroying radioactive waste, rather than storing or burying the potentially hazardous materials.

The project, which is being paid for with $225,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy, is expected to begin in February and could take up to three years to finish.

The university will use a nuclear reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory for experiments during the research project, which was among three chosen this month to use the facility.

The University of California at Berkeley and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas also were picked to use the nuclear reactor to conduct nuclear energy experiments at the 890-square-mile federal nuclear research area in eastern Idaho.

Idaho State's study into the possibility of eliminating waste that includes elements such as plutonium and americium, while not as radioactive as others, is important because these materials can result in long-term storage problems, said Mitch Meyer, program manager for the Advanced Test Reactor Scientific User Facility at the Idaho lab.

"They can reach out into ground water over a period of time, and over the course of tens of thousands of years, they can potentially leach out of storage and into the environment," Meyer told the Idaho State Journal.

The three research projects were chosen as part of a program that started in 2007, when the Energy Department made it easier for university researchers to use the nuclear reactor by reducing how much money it costs.

In April that year, department's Office of Nuclear Energy designated the 40-year-old Advanced Test Reactor as a National User Facility. With that designation, the agency agreed to subsidize much of the cost of running the reactor.

Since the user facility's inception, 15 experiments have been awarded, according to the Idaho laboratory.