Environmental Remediation Studies

One of the major problems facing both the United States and the rest of the World is the loss of fresh water sources and otherwise habitable land due to waste contamination, especially chemical waste from industrial, government, and military sources. Although there has been considerable legislative progress in the United States toward preventing the future creation of severely contaminated sites, few general solutions are presently known for existing problems in ground soil remediation, tank waste processing, and long-term waste storage. These fundamentally multidisciplinary issues will occupy scientists from many disciplines for some years to come.

In collaboration with scientists at Pacific Northwest National Labs, UW Physics faculty (Prof. Ed Stern and Asst. Prof. Gerald Seidler) are performing basic and applied studies of the physics and chemistry of 'supercritical' solutions, i.e. solutions at temperatures and pressures beyond the liquid-vapor critical point.