NSPS Series 2: What does NSPS do in the ground?

Kavin Venkat
3 days ago
4 min read

Every day, invisible particles of antimatter pop into existence all around us, live for a fraction of a second, and disappear in tiny flashes of energy. It sounds like science fiction, but it's happening right now in the soil beneath your feet, in the walls of your house, and even inside your body. Exlterra's NSPS technology has figured out how to use this natural phenomenon to clean up radioactive contamination.

Antimatter in Your Kitchen

Bananas are radioactive. Not dangerously so, but they contain a naturally occurring form of potassium called potassium-40 that slowly breaks down over time. As it decays, it occasionally spits out a positron—a particle of antimatter that's basically an electron with a positive charge instead of a negative one.

Your body does the same thing. You have potassium-40 in your tissues, and it produces about 4,000 positrons inside you every single day. Before you panic, understand that these positrons survive for less than a billionth of a second. They almost instantly collide with regular electrons, and when matter meets antimatter, both particles vanish in a tiny burst of energy.

This process, called annihilation, happens constantly in nature. It's so reliable that doctors use it in PET scanners to see inside your body. They inject you with a substance that emits positrons, and when those positrons meet electrons in your tissues, they create gamma rays that cameras can detect.

When Particles Collide

So what happens during annihilation? When a positron finds an electron, they essentially cancel each other out. All the mass from both particles converts into pure energy—specifically, two bursts of gamma rays that shoot off in opposite directions. Each burst carries exactly 511 thousand electron volts of energy. Scientists see this 511 keV signature everywhere positrons exist: in space near black holes, inside nuclear reactors, and even in thunderclouds during storms.

Places like Chernobyl are loaded with unstable atoms—things like cesium-137 and strontium-90. These atoms want to become stable, but they do it very, very slowly. Cesium-137 takes about 30 years just to lose half its radioactivity. At that rate, seriously contaminated areas remain dangerous for centuries.

Scientists have long known that you can speed up radioactive decay by bombarding unstable atoms with high-energy particles. Particle accelerators do this all the time in labs. The problem is that particle accelerators are massive, expensive, and require enormous amounts of power. You can't exactly set one up in a contaminated field.

Nature's Particle Accelerator

Enter NSPS: Instead of building a machine to create high-energy particles, it creates conditions in the soil that concentrate and direct the positrons that are already there from natural radioactive decay.

NSPS doesn't generate positrons. It doesn't need external power. Instead, it creates pathways and spaces in the soil where naturally occurring positrons tend to accumulate. These concentrated positrons then interact with nearby radioactive atoms much more frequently than they normally would.

When you have a lot of high-energy positron annihilations happening near radioactive atoms, you increase the chances of those atoms breaking down. Each annihilation produces 511 keV of energy. That's not a huge amount, but it's enough to jostle nearby atomic nuclei. Do it enough times, and eventually, you can trigger decay in atoms that would otherwise sit around being radioactive for decades or centuries. It's like trying to knock over a wobbly table. One bump might not do it, but if you keep bumping it over and over, eventually it'll fall. NSPS creates a situation where radioactive atoms get "bumped" by energy from positron annihilations much more often than they would in normal soil.

Once NSPS is installed underground, it just works. No maintenance, no power source, no chemicals. It's manipulating natural processes that were already happening—just making them happen more where you need them most. Think about how a funnel works. Water was already falling, but the funnel directs it where you want it to go. Positrons were already forming and annihilating, but now they're doing it in ways that help break down contamination, thanks to NSPS.

Not Just Radiation

The NSPS technology can be applied to address other types of pollution, too. Chemical contaminants often involve unstable molecular bonds that could also be disrupted by positron interactions. Heavy metals and industrial pollutants have structures that respond to high-energy particles, potentially offering new ways to break them down or transform them into less harmful substances through NSPS.

NSPS bridges the gap between particle physics and practical environmental cleanup. For years, positrons were mainly useful in research labs and hospitals. The idea that you could use them to clean up contaminated soil is relatively new, but it doesn't require any new physics or speculative science. It's just using what we already know about how antimatter behaves, how positrons interact with regular matter, and how energy affects radioactive atoms.

Exlterra's promising results in Chernobyl suggest we're only starting to understand what's possible when we work with nature's subatomic processes instead of against them.