干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Environments contaminated with alpha-emitters (mostly actinides) represent a serious hazards to humans and nature. Current technologies to monitor and remediate areas contaminated with alpha-emitters are often hindered by our limited understanding of the actinide fate and transport behavior in those environments. Here we demonstrate how the well-established simple technique of alpha-autoradiography can be deployed in a field setting to enhance our understanding of actinide transport, to determine the spatial distribution of actinides in soils, and to help identify the morphology of the association of actinides with soil constituents. Preliminary conclusions are drawn relative to controls that govern the fate and transport of actinides that were deposited more than 40 years ago in the semi-arid soils of the Nevada Test Site. Our experimental data clearly indicate that actinides move through desert soils. This observation contradicts previous assumptions that actinides are relatively iminobile and remain within the very top soil layer. We were able to demonstrate that the designed tool can be applied for screening in monitoring and reniediation efforts.