In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Manchester has discovered that graphene could just be the most useful sieve to filter nuclear waste in the form of different isotopes of hydrogen.

The research team has been long trying to use graphene's peculiar sieve-like structure to separate the two isotopic forms of hydrogen – deuterium and plain hydrogen. Deuterium has an extra neuron at its core, a property that differentiates it from plain old hydrogen.

Deuterium is mixed with oxygen to make “heavy” water, which is then used in the fission reactors to slow the pace of the emitted neutrons. In addition, it is also used in prototype fusion reactors.

While deuterium is present in Earth's ocean in the form of heavy water in minute quantities, its extraction is not that simple. A relatively expensive and energy intensive method called Girdler sulfide process is first used to enrich seawater to 20 percent heavy water.

The Royal Chemistry Society reports that since the concentration of the heavy water used in nuclear power plants is around 99 percent, the further processing of heavy water consumes a lot of energy and time. Thus, the nuclear power plants end up investing millions of dollars in the processing of heavy water.

To help nuclear power plants reduce power generation costs, the researchers decided to develop a technique that could easily filter out deuterium and simple hydrogen from each other. The team has developed a small-scale commercial device that consumes a mix of deuterium and hydrogen, filter them and pumps out just oxygen, reports Gizmodo Australia.

The device is based on the ability of the graphene to filter out protons, the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms, from the nuclei of deuterium, which is an isotope. During the filtration process, the deuterium nuclei remain behind as the proton passes through the thin sheet of graphene. The discovery is relatively unexpected since the researchers initially thought that both proton and deuterium might pass through the sheet together.

The complete details of the study have been published in the journal Science.