daughter of an (almost) famous dad

I love that my dad, the man I used to argue endlessly with about such things as politics and the environment (and my curfew...), is now uber involved in saving the world by nuking nuclear waste. See below, or read the full artcle, "Haste to make waste into energy: New high-tech conversion methods are popping up."

A research team in Trail, B.C., for example, designed a facility to clean up hazardous waste from a Second World War plutonium production site in Washington state.

The project is run by an international management group, AMEC Inc., which owns the global rights to a process called GeoMelt. The technology uses temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees to melt contaminated matter that, once hardened, becomes an inert, glass-like solid that can be buried or recycled.

"It is a unique application for nuclear-waste treatment," said Brett Campbell, unit manager at the plant in Hanford, Wash. "We're doing something that no one in the world is doing."

Though the technology was first designed decades ago, it has been evolving and improving since. Now it is commercially available through AMEC, which hopes to attract customers in a variety of sectors.

"It's applicable to a mixed waste stream, not just radioactive [waste]," Mr. Campbell said. For example, he said, it could be used to treat hazardous materials such as asbestos.

John Stephens is senior project manager in Trail and part of the team that designed the Washington facility, which was completed this summer. He said the $90-million (U.S.) project will run over two years, enough time to prove to the U.S. Department of Energy that the GeoMelt technology is efficient before earning a contract to help clean up the site by 2028. He has no doubt it will pass the test.

"It's amazing that there is the technology that can deal with a problem that a lot of people have been agonizing over for 50 years," Mr. Stephens said, referring to the dilemma of what to do with nuclear waste.

"Somebody unlocked Pandora's box and now we can actually put a lid on it."