NEWPORT NEWS, Va. – It's been 30 years since a project in Miami-Dade County found that blasting wastewater with electrons could clean it, removing all kinds of stuff, from microorganisms to harsh chemicals.
All that was needed was some intrepid scientist or engineer to come up with an accelerator that was cost-effective, compact and user-friendly enough to clean wastewater on an industrial scale.
The world is still waiting for it.
Many countries have been inching forward in using accelerators for environmental remediation — removing toxic dyes from wastewater at a textile factory in South Korea, for instance, or sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides from flue gases at a power plant in Poland. But such devices are still too big and unreliable.
Physicists at Jefferson Laboratory in Virginia are working on two designs that they hope could change that. Fay Hannon is dreaming up a low-energy, portable accelerator for environmental cleanup, while Gianluigi "Gigi" Ciovati is figuring out how to use a commercial cryocooler to stabilize a more powerful accelerator he's designing.
"I'm of a generation where environmental protection really weighs on your mind," Hannon said. "In this case, wastewater treatment is not my specialty, but providing the resource that can do that is."
Hannon considers herself an electrical engineer turned physicist. "I've always been interested in things working nicely and neatly and being able to predict it," she said.
Now she's trying to design a nice, neat and predictable accelerator. "It's the wall-plug power, what you're pulling from the grid to operate this, and how much dose you get from that — that's the real step forward that we're trying to make," Hannon said.