The correlation between selenium adsorption and the mineral and chemical composition of Taiwan local granite samples

Selenium-79 (Se-79) is a radioactive isotope of selenium, which is considered as one of the highly mobile nuclides since Se-79 would be presented in an anion species when dissolving into the intruded groundwater. Being an anionic species, the transport of Se-79 would be regulated by the metal oxides relevant minerals such as goethite and hematite (Jan et al., 2008). This is true that the transport of selenium in the shallow surface environment could be relatively easy to estimate by considering the amount of these metal oxides presenting in the soils and sediments. However, when dealing with deep geological repository, the transport of Se-79 becomes less predictable because of the much less content of metal oxide residing in the host rock such as granite. In order to conduct a reliable performance assessment of repository, it is very important to establish the correlation between selenium adsorption and the properties of potential host rock, in this study, the mineral and chemical compositions of Taiwan local granite. From this point of view, selenium adsorption experiments were conducted with 54 different Taiwan local granite samples collected from the depth ranging from 100 ∝ 400 meters below the surface. These granite samples represent a variety of deep geological environments, including the intact rock, groundwater intruded zones, and some weathered samples. Based upon our preliminary results, several solid conclusions could be made. First, the correlation coefficients between the Kd values and the mineral and chemical compositions are rather low (R-square values are often < 0.2). This points out the complexity of these geological samples and strongly suggests more efforts should be put into to acquire more relevant information. Second, the correlation between the selenium Kd values and the content of iron oxide (R-square 0.110) is much higher than that between the CEC of these granite samples (R-square 0.001). This clearly indicates that the minerals that are able to underlie cation exchange reaction would not be the minerals regulating the transport of selenium nuclides. Further, a relative high correlation coefficient (R-square 0.137) between the variation of pH before and after selenium adsorption and iron oxide content implies that surface complexation reaction is much likely accounting for selenium adsorption. Future works would be particularly focusing on the outlet data interpretation (i.e., high iron oxide content but low Kd value and vice versa) as well as the form/phase regarding the origin of these iron oxide contents.