There may now be a way of not only storing radioactive waste safely, but recycling it too.

The seeming miracle answer to one of the world's most pressing questions -- "What do we do with radioactive waste materials?" -- is the element californium, which is itself radioactive and was discovered at the University of California, Berkeley (hence the name), in 1950.

Recent experiments conducted by researchers from 10 different universities and institutes and led by Florida State Professor Thomas Albrecht-Schmitt have determined californium is extremely resistant to damage from radioactivity and is also able to bond with and separate other materials.

Calling it "wicked stuff," Albrecht-Schmitt said in a news release californium could literally change how radioactive waste around the world is stored and fuel is reused -- which can be accomplished when you have the ability to separate radioactive materials, like californium can.

Albrecht-Schmitt's findings appear in the article "Unusual Structure, Bonding, and Properties in a Californium Borate," which has been published appears in the journal Nature Chemistry.

"It's almost like snake oil," said Albrecht-Schmitt. "It sounds almost too good to be true."

In fact, the astonishingly high price of californium -- for only 5 milligrams of the stuff, the good professor forked over $1.4 million and had to spend years working with the United States Department of Energy -- might effectively make it too good to be true for at a great many other researchers and energy operations.

But, "This has real world application...It's not purely an academic practice," reminds Albrecht-Schmitt. "We're changing how people look at californium and how it can be used."

All of the experiments were conducted at Florida State, though David A. Dixon, a professor of chemistry at the University of Alabama, and a graduate student provided the calculations and theory for why californium could bond in such unique ways with other materials.

Meanwhile, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois helped correlate the theory with the experiments and researchers Evgeny Alekseev and Wulf Depmeier from Germany offered additional understanding about the atomic structure of californium.