Review of Distribution Coefficients for Radionuclides in Carbonate Minerals

An understanding of the transport of radionuclides in carbonate minerals is necessary to be able to predict the fate of (and potentially remediate) radionuclides in the environment. In some environments, carbonate minerals such as calciate, aragonite, dolomite and limestone are present and an understanding of the sorption of radionuclides in these carbonate minerals is therefore advantageous. A list of the radionuclides of interest is given in Table 1. The distribution coefficient, Kd is defined as the ratio of the contaminant concentration bound on the solid phase to the contaminant concentration remaining in the liquid phase at equilibrium. Some authors report distribution coefficients and other report partition coefficients, the data presented in this work assumes equality between these two terms, and data are presented and summarized in this work as logarithmic distribution coefficient (log KD). Published literature was searched using two methods. Firstly, the JNC Sorption Database, namely Shubutani et al (1999), and Suyama and Sasamoto (2004) was used to select elements of interest and a number of carbonate minerals. Secondly, on-line literature search tools were used to locate relevant published articles from 1900 to 2009. Over 300 data points covering 16 elements (hydrogen, carbon, calcium, nickel, strontium, technetium, palladium, iodine, cesium, samarium, europium, holmium, uranium, neptunium, plutonium and americium) were used to calculate an average and range of log Kd values for each element. Unfortunately, no data could be found for chlorine, argon, krypton, zirconium, niobium, tin, thorium and curium. A description of the data is given below, together with the average, standard deviation, minimum, maximum and number of inputs for radionuclide Kd values for calcite, aragonate, limestone, dolomite and unidentified carbonate rocks in Table 2. Finally, the data are condensed into one group (carbonate minerals) of data for each element of interest in Table 3