nuclear waste

To scope out a suspected Mafia shipwreck that may hold nuclear material, Italian authorities sent in the robot.

A remote-controlled sub began filming a sunken vessel off Italy's southern coast over the weekend. That shipwreck may represent just one of 30 ships deliberately sunk in a rather sociopathic act of nuclear waste dumping.

The use of concrete dates back to ancient Rome, and the recipe hasn't changed much since then. Neither have some of concrete's drawbacks. In particular, the slow deformation known as "concrete creep" has afflicted structures from the Pantheon to the Pentagon. But MIT scientists believe they have solved the mystery of concrete creep, and thus opened the door to structures that will last tens of thousands of years.

At the end of this tunnel, which snakes as deep as 820 feet below the Hungarian countryside, lies a new long-term nuclear-waste facility, set to open in 2010. Located on the outskirts of the village of Bátaapáti, it will store more than 10.5 million gallons of low- and intermediate-level waste produced at the Paks nuclear power plant, which is 40 miles away. The waste consists of protective clothing and contaminated tools and materials from processing. It collectively accounts for 97 percent of the volume of radioactive waste from the plant.

With global warming grabbing headlines, carbon-free nuclear power is gaining popularity—and with it, concerns over what to do with the spent uranium fuel. The largest long-term burial project, Yucca Mountain, has stalled, and even though uranium’s first trip through a reactor extracts only 5 percent of its energy, power plants in the U.S. don’t reprocess fuel. This is mainly because the most common form of uranium, an ion called uranyl, is extremely difficult to extract from the spent fuel rods. But a new Pac-Man-like molecule could change that.