128 A Tribute to Rodney C. Ewing: Celebrating a Half-Century of Transformative Contributions to Geoscience, Mineralogy, and Material Science
Honoring Prof. Rodney C. Ewing (1946–2024), this session celebrates over 50 years of groundbreaking contributions to mineralogy, geoscience, and materials science, from atomic-scale processes to field-scale applications.
Monday, 20 October 2025
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
HBGCC, 217A
Rod Ewing’s influence on my career, and the remarkable conceptual overlap between the nuclear fuel cycle and nanogeoscience
Paper number: 128-3
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 2:10 PM – 2:25 PM
Authors
Abstract
Rod Ewing and I shared experiences by attending the same graduate school, serving as presidents of various societies, serving on high-level federal technical panels and boards, executing the formation of Elements magazine, and most importantly, sharing ways to think about fundamental science and how to translate that into solving large-scale real-world problems. Celebrating Rod’s extraordinary life in science and society, most participants will be speaking about core areas of research highly relevant to the many aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle that Rod pioneered. In my talk, I will focus on nanogeoscience, my specialty, and point out fundamental similarities to the nuclear fuel cycle. My first example has to do with our discovery that TiO2 (rutile/anatase), a very common minor component of coal, converts to titania suboxide (Tix02x-1) nanoparticles during coal combustion in coal fired power plants. We later determined that these suboxides are toxic in the lungs of humans, and these particles are emitted from power plants that do not have appropriate dust collectors. The second example concerns ocean iron fertilization techniques to build phytoplankton populations in certain portions of the global ocean system to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations at the gigaton scale. This would significantly help to mitigate global warming. Such scenarios have been tested in the oceans, and the results have been very promising. One of the outlying questions has to do with the type of iron-containing fertilizer that will be most effective and safe. Nanoparticle fertilizers (both natural and synthetic) are the leading candidates.
Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6
doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-414323
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