High-speed sponges clean waste
15 Jan 2000
Cleaning up contaminated equipment is a major headache for many industries, but it's particularly troublesome for nuclear installations.
AEA Technology has devised a new method which appears startlingly simple - just sponge away the contamination. You can't wipe down a piece of nuclear equipment, so the AEA team has found a more aggressive method of using sponges. They fire them at the equipment at 150m/s.
The sponge absorbs radioactive particles, reducing radiation levels and allowing the equipment to be treated as lower-level waste. The sponge eventually has to be disposed of as radioactive waste, but its volume is low, so disposal is relatively cheap.
