American scientists at Rutgers University have isolated a microorganism that may hold the key to cleaning up polluted groundwater at sites where uranium ore was processed to make nuclear weapons… In a paper published in the April edition of Public Library of Science (PLoS), the team explains how a soil bacteria found at an old uranium ore mill in Rifle, Colorado, can lock up radioactive element that leached into the soil, polluting water… “After the newly discovered bacteria interact with uranium compounds in water, the uranium becomes immobile,” Lee Kerkhof, a professor of marine and coastal sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, said in a statement. “It is no longer dissolved in the groundwater and therefore can’t contaminate drinking water brought to the surface.”