In the method that Waples and his colleagues devised, the age of water can be measured based on the rate of decay of the “daughter” yttrium relative to the rate of decay of the “parent” strontium.
When it decays, it becomes yttrium-90, a very short-lived radionuclide with a half-life of only 64 hours. Much of the remaining atomic fallout is strontium-90, a relatively long-lived radionuclide with a half-life of about 30 years. How much time? It depends on their half-life – the amount of time it takes for half of the original material to decay. While no longer a health hazard, these half-century-old atoms, called radionuclides, decay over time. “An infinitesimal amount of radioactive fallout is still in the environment and we can measure that.” “Here, we are using the remnants of atom bombs detonated decades ago,” said Waples, an assistant professor in UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences. The researchers hope their dating method will lead to new insight into the factors that affect drinking water quality in the nearly 2,000 miles of water mains in Milwaukee and other distribution networks around the world. UWM scientist Jim Waples and an interdisciplinary research team have found a new method of finding the age of water at any point in a distribution system using something that’s already naturally in water: residual radioactive atoms from nuclear fallout of the 1950s and early ’60s. Minimizing the water’s travel time in pipes reduces both processes, but measuring that time is difficult. It can take days for water to travel from a filtration plant to your tap and the length of time the journey takes could affect water quality.ĭisinfectants from water treatment, like chlorine, prevent the growth of harmful microbes, but they can break down over time, creating toxic byproducts in the process. Could this new technique make our drinking water safer? He’s uncovered a way to use nuclear fallout to tell us the age of water.
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