Development of Methods for Assessing Uranium Mobility in Groundwater

CBCL已经确定了他们的工程咨询公司对水务公司开发新工具以评估源水中铀流动性的业务需求。一旦开发和验证，这些工具和技术将增强它们的能力，并极大地改善它们可以提供的服务。铀是一种自然存在的元素，存在于某些类型的土壤和岩层中。在某些环境条件下，它可以溶解并污染用于供应饮用水的地下水系统。在开发饮用水供应之前，有一种可靠的方法来测试地质材料在不同的地球化学条件下将铀释放到地下水中的潜力，这将是有用的。这些信息将有助于地下水资源评估，并降低开发地下水供应的风险，这种地下水供应可能产生对人类健康有害的铀浓度。从地下水中去除铀在技术上具有挑战性，而且成本高昂。这一研究项目的目标是开发和验证评估含水层材料中铀流动性的新测试方法。该测试程序将用于评估从潜在的市政地下水供应中钻取的勘探孔中取样的岩石材料的铀浸出潜力。一旦得到验证，这一新的测试方法将提供有用的工具，CBCL可以用来支持各种客户的地下水资源评估。

CBCL has identified a business need within their engineering consultancy to water utilities to develop newtools to evaluate uranium mobility in source water. Once developed and validated, these tools and techniqueswill enhance their capabilities and greatly improve the services they can offer. Uranium is a naturally occurringelement found within certain types of soil and rock formations. Under certain environmental conditions, it canbecome soluble and contaminate groundwater systems that are used to supply drinking water. Prior to thedevelopment of potable water supplies it would be useful to have a reliable way to test geological material forits potential to release uranium into groundwater under varying geochemical conditions. This informationwould aid in groundwater resource evaluations, and mitigate the risk of developing a groundwater supply thatcould produce uranium concentrations that are harmful to human health. The removal of uranium fromgroundwater is technically challenging and expensive. The objective of this research project is to develop andvalidate new testing methods for evaluating uranium mobility from aquifer materials. The testing procedurewill be applied to assess uranium leaching potential from rock materials sampled from exploratory boreholesdrilled in a potential municipal groundwater supply. Once validated this new testing method would provide avaluable tool that CBCL could use to support groundwater resource assessments for a variety of clients.