Mining medical isotopes from nuclear waste

Abstract

A half hour north of Seattle in Everett, about 15 black barrels sit in a nondescript storage facility owned by the nuclear innovation company TerraPower. Each barrel is the size of a large trash can, around 110 L, and weighs over 350 kg. What’s held within is . . . complicated. Just inside the thick shell is a layer of foam padding. Within that padding sits a heavy-duty container, which in turn encloses a steel pipe capped on each end. Inside the pipe is a screw-top aluminum can, which holds a thick plastic bag, which encases a glass vial about the size of a tube of toothpaste. “It’s sort of your classic Russian doll,” says Jeff Latkowski, TerraPower’s senior vice president of innovation. That innermost glass vial holds half a gram of a yellow matter—a mixture of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. These smidgens of material would normally have