There are some jobs I just wouldn’t want to do, like simulate nuclear waste sludge.  It doesn’t sound nice.  Who knows, it might be fun.  It certainly has its set of challenges, and it’s important as well. The idea is to develop processes for handling nuclear waste, specifically from defense waste processing facilities.  But you Read More

So you’ve got a waste material tank that has been a hotbed of nuclear and chemical activity.  Now you want to clean it up. It’s unlikely that the tank will ever be a swimming pool, but you want to minimize the residual environmental hazard.  So you’ll develop a process to clean up the insoluble salts, Read More

When you’re doing something—anything—at a nuclear power plant, you can’t afford a mistake.  That’s why they try to validate every process they can before they make it live.  For example, they wanted to validate the performance of the sludge receipt and adjustment tank cycles.  If they did that with nuclear waste and they made a Read More

We’ve reported before on research being done to enhance the strength of rubber with the addition of soy protein fillers, offering both a greener manufacturing process and the possibility of biodegradability.  In this report the same USDA researcher has taken it a step further.  Rather than using primary soy protein as the filler, Lei Jong Read More

The mechanical properties of rubber can be improved by incorporating some filler material in the rubber matrix. Traditionally, carbon black is added to artificial rubber produced from styrene-butadiene which increases the tensile strength significantly.  Carbon black, though, is typically produced from fossil fuels of some sort, so there’s interest in replacing it with a more Read More

Every industry wants to achieve energy efficiency, for every reason from the financial to the ethical. Here’s an example I wouldn’t have thought of: extracting proteins from the residues of processed seed oil.  I won’t claim to understand all of this paper written by Canadian researchers, but apparently there are multiple seed processing stages and Read More

Volatile organic compounds.  Their official definition is as “any organic compound that participates in atmospheric photochemical reactions.”  That is, they’re nasty chemicals that change the chemical constituents of the atmosphere from what it should be to what it shouldn’t be.  That doesn’t sound very good, which is why there’s a lot of interest in eliminating Read More

According to an international team of researchers based in the U.S. and Pakistan, 70 percent of calories of the traditional diet is provided by cereal grains.  Unfortunately, those same cereal grains aren’t as high in nutritive value.  In an attempt to improve that situation, the research team investigated the effects of adding rice bran to wheat Read More

It’s hard enough feeding your family the vegetables they need; what would you do if you were charged with the task of feeding vegetables to more than a million active servicemen?  Undoubtedly you’d figure out some economical method of storing vegetables so they can be transported and provided to troops around the world.  At that Read More