The Suppression of Nuclear Waste Decontamination Technology
By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
Brown's Gas: 40-Year-Old Nuclear Decontamination Technology
I first learned about Brown’s gas from an interview on Radio Out There with Nexus magazine
publisher Duncan Roads. He talked about the magazine's 200th edition, featuring the magazine's 20
top news stories (over 36 years). Roads refers to a 2017 article on Brown’s gas.[1] Although the
article itself focuses solely on its health benefits, in the interview Roads also mentions its use in
nuclear waste decontamination.
Owing to my involvement in a nearly 40-year campaign to clean up up the Hanford nuclear
reservation in Eastern Washington, I was gobsmacked tho learn there was a 50-year-old safe and
inexpensive process for decontaminating nuclear waste.
After further investigation, I was even more astonished to learn that Brown’s gas is one of
numerous inexpensive and peer reviewed methods of nuclear waste decontamination. In fact,
nuclear physicists around the world have been begging government bureaucrats in the US, Canada,
Japan and Britain to trial these technologies on contaminated nuclear sites for nearly 30 years – to
no avail.
Trained as an electrical engineer, Professor Yull Brown, the inventor of Brown's gas, emigrated
from Bulgaria to Australia in 1958. He filed his first patents for Brown’s gas generators in 1974, 10
years after William A. Rhodes filed for similar patents for an HHO electrolysis unit. During the
early 1990s, Brown moved to California, applied for more patents and attracted $30 million in
venture capital for to refine his generators for numerous uses, including nuclear waste
decontamination.
Brown’s gas is created by passing an electrical current through water under pressure, splitting it into
ionic hydrogen and oxygen gas and igniting it. Brown's gas has some very peculiar properties,
including the ability to sublimate (gasify) Tungsten (6000ºC) with an implosive flame that burns
cool (at 130ºC) in air.
In 1992 at the request of Congressman Berkeley Bedell, US Department of Energy officials
observed a demonstration in Ontario California in which a Brown's gas torch reduced the
radioactivity of Cobalt 60 by 96%.
Presently this technology has been successfully demonstrated at least 50 times to US, Chinese,
Japanese and United Kingdom officials on a variety of nuclear waste products, including
Americium, Cobalt, Uranium, and Plutonium.
It is believed that treatment with Brown's gas substantially reduces the radioactivity of nuclear
waste via transmutation, a process altering the nuclei of atoms to produce a new, non-radioactive
isotopes.
Most Brown's Gas Generators Produced in China
Presently most Brown’s gas generators are produced in China, mainly for welding, brazing,
personal health purposes and improved vehicle fuel efficiency. Ongoing Chinese research into
Brown’s gas includes applications in shipbuilding, pharmaceutical glass-making, hospital waste
treatment units, waste treatment (including nuclear waste treatment) and production of drinking
water from sea water.[2]
It's also possible to order 3,535 models of Brown's gas generators online from 65 different suppliers
at the "Made in China" website. Prices (in US dollars) range from $78 to $42,000.
According to Dr Andrew Michrowski of the Planetary Alliance for Clean Energy (PACE) in Ottawa,
near the end of his life, Brown also sought to work with Chinese scientists to develop cars that ran
on water, using Brown's gas generators to produce hydrogen fuel. Having driven a car in Australia
that ran on water, he was deeply disappointed when they declined to pursue this application. [2]
Nuclear Waste Disposal: A Serious International Dilemma
The issue of nuclear waste disposal poses a serious dilemma for all countries involved in nuclear
weapons and nuclear energy production – as well as Pacific Rim countries threatened by Japan’s
imminent plans to dump radioactive Fukushima cooling water into the Pacific Ocean.
In the US, radioactive waste from nuclear power plants (mainly consisting of spent fuel rods) is
cooled a year or more in a water-filled pool prior to placement in a steel cask. The casks are
currently stored in dry cask vaults at a growing number of power plant sites, and at an interim
facility located at the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls.
Nuclear waste from former US nuclear weapons facilities is more problematic. According to
Chemical and Engineering News, more than a quarter million metric tons of highly radioactive
waste sits in storage near current and former worldwide weapons production facilities, with over
90,000 metric tons in the US alone. Posing serious risks to human health and the environment with
the radiation it emits, the waste, much of it decades old, awaits permanent disposal in future
(presently non-operational). With nowhere to go, the hazardous materials and their containers
continue to age. In many cases, the aging containers have already begun leaking.
In the case of Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington, about a third of the buried
containers of liquid radioactive waste are leaking hexavalent chromium and strontium-90 into local
groundwater, which, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is flowing freely
into the Columbia River. The latter is a major water source for crop irrigation, as well as a
recreational fishing site. In fact, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife heavily promotes the
Columbia for Salmon, Sturgeon, Walleye and Smallmouth Bass, but oddly fails to warn anglers to
check their catch with a Geiger counter prior to eating it.
The Chemical and Engineering News also reports the Hanford site is gearing up to vitrify its waste
in a multibillion-dollar Department of Energy (DOE) vitrification facility. Under construction since
2002, the DOE promises "some" vitrification operations will begin this year. Given the operation’s
past history of delays and cost overruns, this looks doubtful.
The plan at Hanford, for example, calls for entombing nuclear waste in borosilicate glass and
encasing the glass in stainless-steel canisters. Yet despite the billions of dollars spent on Hanford's
vitrification plant, the exact formulation of the glass, or glasses, is still under investigation.
Important questions remain unanswered (eg what glass compositions lead to the highest uptake of
nuclear waste, how suited are they to vitrification, and how long will they resist corrosion in a
repository environment?)
Nuclear Waste Storage Plagued by Delay, Waste and Scandal
In general, cleanup of America's nuclear weapons facilities has been mired in delay, waste and
scandal. Already in 1992, US New and World Report reported that waste and fraud had cost US
taxpayers $200 billion (40 cents of every dollar spent).[3]
It's mind boggling to contemplate the hundreds of billions of dollars that has been wasted on what
so far as been a futile effort to use "storage" as the primary method for protecting us and future
generations from potentially life threatening nuclear waste. I find it especially frustrating given the
immense time and effort Brown and his supporters have invested in educating Western governments
about cheap and effective technologies to decontaminate nuclear waste instead of storing it.
Why Do Technologies for Nuclear Waste Decontamination Continue to Be Ignored?
Prior to his death in 1998, Brown gifted to the Planetary Association for Clean Energy the
intellectual property rights for the use of Brown's gas generators in nuclear waste decontamination.
Yet thirty years of concerted efforts by PACE scientists to persuade US and Canadian officials to to
undertake nuclear decontamination trials with this surprisingly inexpensive technology. As occurred
during his lifetime, there are numerous false starts and at the last minute, funding is mysteriously
diverted elsewhere.
Along with decontamination of solid wastes with Brown's gas, PACE also promotes a number of
other cheap and efficient decontamination methods, most involving transmutation. This begs the
question why World Nuclear Association, which dismisses transmutation as “excessively costly and
inefficient,” is deliberately disparaging transmutation. They base this conclusion on an deceptively
narrow definition of transmutation ("the process of transforming one radionuclide into another via
neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor or accelerator-driven device"). Yet, as seen below, none
of the decontamination methods PACE proposes employ either a nuclear reactor or a particle
accelerator.[4]
Some Brown's gas advocates point to the extremely low cost of his generators as a key reason for
Western governments to sideline them. This means the powerful corporations who dictate our
nuclear policies see no potential to profit from the technology. A Brown's gas generator is so easy to
make that numerous Internet sites offer free step-by-step guidelines.
Brown raised another possibility during his lifetime, namely that his a technology enabling people
to run their cars on water could put a number of powerful corporations out of business. Brown
wasn't the only inventor to run a car (fitted with a Brown’s gas generator) on water. In the late
nineties. Ohio inventor Stanley Meyer also patented a fuel cell that allowed him to run his car on
water by splitting off hydrogen from water. Meyer was mysteriously poisoned while dining with
investors in a Ohio Cracker Barrel Restaurant in 1998.
Either way, the refusal of Western governments to acknowledge the numerous peer reviewed
technologies available for cheap and efficient nuclear waste decontamination is a human tragedy of
unimaginable proportions.
Notes
[1] Extraordinary Healing Power of Brown's Gas, Nexus Magazine, Nov 2017
[2] Dr Andrew Michrowski, Planetary Alliance for Clean Energy, personal communication.
[3] "A $200 Billion Scandal," US News and World Report, Dec 14, 1992. The "dirty dozen" the
article singles out include Argonne National Lab, Battelle Columbus Lab, Hanford, Lawrence
Livermore, Brookhaven National Lab, Nevada Test Site, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, Sandia National
Lab, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (Carlsbad NM) and Weldon Springs Site (St Charles Mo).
[4] A partial list of decontamination options, depending on the medium (liquid, earth, concrete,
metal, vegetation) in which the radioactive waste is contained:
 AmoTerra: processes both 1) ashed radioactive materials intermixed with AmoTerra
proprietary mixtures and 2) radioactive contaminated hard surface materials. 1) involves
confined explosions resulting in reduced radioactivity (to near-background levels) over 1 to
4 days. 2) uses a proprietary laser technique to render radioactive hard-surface materials (eg
stainless steel) radiation-free in about 3 minutes.
 ZIPP fusion: produces wide variety of fusion reactions from radical compression of
individual diatomic and other simple molecules dissolved or suspended in a light water
carbon arc electrolysis cell. As it produces only stable isotopes, can potentially stabilize a
wide variety of radioactive waste materials.
 Photoremediation: employs a high-energy electron beam, which in turn produces
monochromatic gamma radiation to induce photofission and photoneutron reactions in the
target material, leading to rapid neutralization of radioactive isotopes.
 RIPPLE Fission: utilizes supersonic ionized gas to aerosol a counter flow heat exchanger
that envelopes the radioactive waste aerosol in a vacuum induced plasma vortex. This
disruption results in “gentle” low recoil fission reactions which produce only stable fission
products, with excess neutrons being promptly converted to protons via quenched Beta
emissions. It's believed applicable to the entire spectrum of Radwaste without the need for
waste partitioning.
 LENTEC: produce a variety of transmutation reactions using a variety of electrolysis cells
designed to produce condensed charge clusters, which with special electrodes can penetrate
the nuclei of larger atoms in solution and transmute these atoms into stable elements.
 PITT Processes (aka HDCC): Plasma Induced/Injected Transmutation processes date back to
the Oshawa-Kushi cold plasma transmutations reported in 1964. Best results for radioactive
liquids have been demonstrated in the processing of thorium for a 30-minute period and
achieving a reduction of radioactivity of about 90% from a liquid sample.
 Kervran Reactions (aka Bio-Nuclear remediation): biologically-based transmutations
typically involving a reaction medium composed of a dielectric fluid such as water. Highly
radiation-resistant microorganisms have been found thriving in the core of nuclear reactors
indicating the possibility of microorganisms being capable of transmuting some bioactive
nuclear wastes in the course of the normal metabolism of such organisms.
 Higher Group Symmetry Electrodynamics: process modulating the quantitative and/or
qualitative reactions and significantly altering the radioactivity of wastes (even in the
environment) via exposure to non-classical, higher group symmetry electromagnetic fields.
The technology is extremely simple and could be applied with minimum logistics for
treating massive areas, in-toto outdoors, such as the Chernobyl disaster.