Scouring radioactive waste usually means just that. Scrub
with soap and water, pails and brushes. Repeat. If it sounds messy, it is – and dangerous too for those exposed to dust and contaminated wastewater. Hawaii-based CBI Polymers says it’s come up with a better way to clean up nuclear waste. The firm’s blue goo may not look high-tech; all you do is pour it. But as the superabsorbent goo gels, its molecules act as a sponge, binding and encapsulating radioactive molecules. Peel the film off and you’ve got lightweight waste that can be rolled up and disposed of more cheaply and easily than vats of toxic water.
“It’s the same concept as Silly Putty.
It gets into every pore, nook, and cranny,” says the Department of Energy’s Hector Rodriguez, who used it to sop up beryllium, a hazardous metal, left over from weapons research at the National Energy Technology.
Laboratory in Oregon. The yearlong project cut the labor used in such efforts by 70 percent. This year CBI donated 500 gallons to the nuclear cleanup in Japan, where it decontaminated 25,000 square feet of walls, sidewalks, and playgrounds. It’s also good on toxic PCBs, asbestos, and heavy metals like mercury – on everything from battleships to power plants– as well as nonindustrial messes. That’s heavy-duty work for such humble-looking goo.

The magnitude 9 earthquake that rocked Japan last March and triggered a tsunami killed more than 15,000 washed millions of tons of debris – cars, houses, chunks of whole towns – into the ocean.
Since then the grim flotsam has been heading east through fisheries, shipping lanes and natural habitats.
To figure out when and where it will go, Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner of the International Pacific Research Center are using a new ocean-current model based on satellite data and the drifting behavior of 15,000 scientific buoys.
They predict the debris field will reach the Midway Islands one year after the disaster. By the second anniversary it will hit Hawaii. In three years the North American coast will see it. Finally, five years after it was loosened, the debris will join the infamous North Pacific Garbage Patch.
Oceanographers Curt Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham favor an older predictive model based more on wind effects. They say objects poking out of the water – car tires, TV sets, plastic toys – could reach California and British Columbia this year.
By 2014, says Ebbesmeyer solemnly, so could shoe-encased feet. His message to beachcombers: “Be respectful.”

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