The vast reservoir of carbon stored beneath our feet is entering Earth's atmosphere at an increasing rate, according to a new study in the journal Nature.
Imagine a hollow tube thousands of times smaller than a human hair. Now envision filthy water flowing through an array of such tubes, each designed to capture contaminants on the inside, with clean water emerging at the other end.
Organic matter found in vast quantities in oxygen-starved floodplains would yield only minimal energy for hungry microorganisms, which spurn the meal, researchers show in a study in Nature Geoscience.
Cleaning up Hanford is no easy task: it is one of the world's largest and most complex environmental remediation projects. The nation's top engineering firms are on the job and the Department of Energy's PNNL is helping.