Decontamination of radioactive-contaminated soils: Evaluation of chemical extraction/selective dissolution processes

Rust Federal Services, Inc.'s Clemson Technical Center (CTC) has investigated the remediation of several radioactive-contaminated soils, from various DOE-FUSRAP sites, via soil washing/chemical extraction of the radioactive contaminants. The second phase of this work, which is the subject of this presentation, focused on chemical extraction via selective dissolution of radioactive contaminants. In those instances where simple physical separation processes are not practicable, e.g., when there are relatively high proportions of silt and/or clay particles, chemical extraction and the selective dissolution of target contaminants is required. Soil-decontamination processes frequently employ chelating agents which are meant to selectively enhance the dissolution of target contaminants while minimizing the dissolution of benign soil constituents. This paper will present the dissolution kinetics results from the bench-scale soil-decontamination studies