There aren’t many things I’d less like to have in my pocket than nuclear waste. I’d say that’s a reasonable reaction to this deadly cocktail of metals. Mostly we shove them in special holding pens underground and hope eventually they will become less scary. Professor Polly Arnold is one of the few people on earth who chooses, yes chooses, to get up close to this radioactive nightmare and make it her business to investigate these very very large, and often very very, deadly metals.

One of the tricks that Polly Arnold’s group uses to study these metal monsters is to wrap them up in a specially designed organic molecule, or straight jacket. Using different jackets for different metals can enable nuclear waste to be organised into its components. Some of the nastiest atoms can then be gingerly removed, allowing the rest to be reclassified from ‘blimey that’s not likely to cool in the foreseeable’, to ‘well maybe we can use the uranium bit of that as fuel in another reactor, or at least I’m fairly sure we’ve got a place that could keep that safe until it’s ok’.

The straight-jackets aren’t only atom grabbers, they can also help Polly and her team to force new and weird reactions between atoms. Uranium and other really big metals are so large that the neat rules that apply to smaller atoms breakdown, nobody really knows how they will behave. It is a bit like grabbing hold of a firework with some tongs and maybe bringing two fireworks together, and finding out that if you orientate it in a certain way the two fireworks suddenly stick together instead of zooming apart. This is the kind of thing Polly does for kicks, and in this way two uranium atoms have been forced into a twin structure never seen before.

Now to explain the wallpaper: I began wondering what botanical structure I might use to represent something very unstable that might spontaneously release a lot of energy. I got to thinking about snap dragons and Himalayan Balsam plants where the seed pods are held under tension and if you touch them they explode to fire out their seeds. I started to doodle with these shapes and flip them over and repeat them and rotate them, and I was thinking about the idea of something very unstable being locked into a kind of jacket, hopefully you can see a bit of that happening as the layers of print are added.

Now for more playing with the uranium! Polly’s group found that they could get each uranium atom inside an organic molecule that didn’t wrap all around like a straight-jacket, but more like a bit of a skimpy bikini. The dangerous metal was now very exposed. Are you wincing? Making a dash to hide under the bed? Kaboom, right? Luckily they chose to look at what these heavy metals would do if put right next to some of the most stable substances we know of, things like carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide, chemicals with very strong bonds. The format of carbon dioxide is so stable you wouldn’t normally find it in a configuration other than the one that floats around our atmosphere all the time. However, shove it next to our uranium in a bikini and it can be forced into new, previously unheard of shapes. A new carbon carbon bond has been one of the group’s discoveries. The centre of my wallpaper piece is in celebration of this kind of unexpected rejig.

All in all I enjoyed thinking about Arnold’s exploration of chemical bonds and the new molecular shapes that have been discovered. In my wallpaper I have tried to capture the idea of interactions between bodies, the sense of tamed and untamed energy, and new structures that might spontaneously come out of an inherently unstable mix. I for one am very grateful for the bravery and ingenuity that characterises Polly Arnold’s work, and very much hope she continues to be so successful in her exploration of the nature of chemical structures. They are wonderful for their own beauty, but also of such importance to all of our futures.

Source material: Polly Arnold public presentation: ‘Bonding with U’. Edinburgh International Science festival 2012.