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Safe waste for at least a thousand years

By Rob Edwards

12 August 2000

A RARE metallic oxide that resists radiation damage could help solve the
problem of how to dispose of nuclear waste, according to a new study by US,
British and Japanese scientists.

The team says that the synthetic rock and glass materials that are used to
store highly radioactive waste at the moment are prone to crack and leak after
only a hundred years because the radiation dislodges their atoms. But the waste,
which includes plutonium, continues to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands
of years.

The team, from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Imperial College
in London and…

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