AECL remediation technology development and demonstration

Several innovative remediation technologies for the treatment of contaminated soils, groundwater, waste water and organic liquids are being actively pursued at the Chalk River Laboratories of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. The contamination is usually a mixture of radioactive and hazardous species. The treatment objective is to maximize the recovery of clean material and to minimize the volume of secondary waste arising from the remediation steps. The projects, developed in a laboratory, are tested with actual contaminated materials. The technology is then applied to contaminated sites at Chalk River, to determine its feasibility and to gather information on its efficiency and cost effectiveness. Technology has been developed to remove Sr-90 from groundwater to less than 2 Bq/L. The technology demonstration, initially cost-shared with the United States Department of Energy (USDOE), has now treated in excess of 2 million liters of groundwater. Technology is also available to strip Sr-90 from soil both in situ and ex situ. A treatability study was conducted for the removal of uranium, radium and arsenic from groundwater obtained from a land area contaminated by uranium refining operations. Mixed-waste processing has been developed for the removal of uranium from organics to permit alternative treatment of the separated fractions. A horizontal pulsed column and a more conventional mixer/separator system extract uranium from the organic, to allow recycle of the uranium as yellowcake and to allow destruction of the hazardous organic fraction