Mobility of Radionuclides at a Uranium Mill Tailings Impoundment

Saunders and Toran (1995) used an average of 0.9 wt.% amorphous Fe(OH)3 in soil around the Oak Ridge burial ground for calculating sorbent concentrations. The amorphous iron concentrations were obtained from the sequential extraction techniques. To calculate the surface sites in their surface complexation modeling, they used a soil porosity of 40% and dry density of 2.5 g cm-3, respectively. The calculation is recapped here  

For a volume of 1000 cm3 aquifer, the solid matrix portion has a volume of 

600cm3 x 2.5gem-3 = 1500g The total Fe(OH)3 in the soil matrix is 

The volume of pore water in a 1000 cm3 aquifer is 400 cm3. The amount of Fe(OH)3 in contact with 1.0 liter of water is 

6 Mobility of Radionuclides at a Uranium Mill Tailings Impoundment 

---