Radioactive isotopes were first applied to investigate industrial problems some sixty years ago and since then, there has been a continuous expansion in their usage. The oil industry, in particular, was quick to recognise the potential usefulness of this technology and one of the earliest industrial studies in the literature is concerned with the use of radioactive material to tag the cement of...

Given the scale of the contamination associated with 60 years of global nuclear activity, and the inherent high financial and environmental costs associated with invasive physical and chemical clean-up strategies, there is an unparalleled interest in new passive in situ bioremediation processes for sites contaminated with nuclear waste. Many of these processes rely on successfully harnessing ne...

The use of cement and concrete to immobilise radioactive waste is complicated by the wideranging nature of inorganic cementing agents available as well as the range of service environments in which cement is used and the different functions expected of cement. For example, Portland cement based concretes are widely used as structural materials for construction of vaults and tunnels. These const...

In September 1987 an accident occurred with a cesium chloride (CsCl) teletherapy source taken from a cancer therapy institute in Goiânia, Brazil. Misuse of the abandoned source caused widespread contamination of radioactive material (about 50 TBq of Cs) in the town of Goiânia. Decontamination of affected areas did lead to about 3,500 m of solid radioactive wastes, which were disposed in two nea...

In response to the accelerated cleanup goals of the Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratory (Sandia) has developed and utilized a number of simulation models to represent the processing, transportation, and disposal of radioactive waste. Sandia, in conjunction with Simulation Dynamics, has developed a Supply Chain model of the cradle to grave management of radioactive waste. Sandia has...

Strategies for sampling shallow soils at hazardous waste sites are employed primarily to evaluate levels and distributions of contamination. The ensuing analyses of potential public health impacts are therefore dependent on the sampling design rather than having the sampling design based on the data needs for evaluating potential public health impacts of shallow soil contamination. We define a ...

Canister integrity and radionuclides retention is of prime importance for assessing the long term safety of nuclear waste stored in engineered geologic depositories. A comparative investigation of the interaction of uranyl ion with three different mineral surfaces has thus been undertaken in order to point out the influence of surface composition on the adsorption mechanism(s). Periodic DFT cal...

experiments, for aqueous Cr(VI) solutions having low buffering capacities, over the Cr(VI) concentration range of 5 – 40 mg/L. The results showed that the initial Cr(VI) concentration significantly affects the reduction capacity of scrap iron. Maximum reduction capacity of scrap iron was observed at the beginning of the column experiments; the lower the Cr(VI) concentration, the greater the exp...

Following the ban on deep sea disposal of radioactive wastes in 1983 the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the United Kingdom (UK) has stored plutonium (Pu) and uranium (U) contaminated wastes on site in 200 l steel drums or as wrapped packages containing filters or other materials. This was because of difficulty in demonstrating compliance with the with the 100 Bq/g Pu alpha activity limit...

The recent quest for primary votes in the state of Nevada led to renewed headlines about radioactive waste disposal at Yucca Mountain. The image of intense debate among the candidates over this issue—in the context of an ongoing war and the threat of terrorism, of a housing collapse, of a potentially declining economy, and of a looming crisis in funding medical care—prompted me to ruminate yet ...