Botanical survey and screening of plant species which accumulate 226Ra from contaminated soil of uranium waste depot

Study of soil–plant transfer of 226Ra under greenhouse conditions

“…The sludge beds are distributed over an area of about 2.33 km 2 . The mill tailings from both types of extraction were deposited on dump K1 while the IV/R lagoon contained mill tailings from alkaline extraction (Soudek et al, 2007b).…”

Comparison of 226Ra nuclide from soil by three woody species Betula pendula, Sambucus nigra and Alnus glutinosa during the vegetation period

“…Phytoremediation studies on the treatment of radioactivity contaminated soils have been carried out using different plant species (Markose et al, 1993;Khatir Sam, 1995;Ebbs et al, 1998;Carini, 1999;Madruga et al, 2001;Blanco Rodríguez et al, 2002;Soudek et al, 2004Soudek et al, , 2007Pulhani et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2005). In most cases herbal species have been used, e.g.…”

Biogeochemical aspects of uranium mineralization, mining, milling, and remediation

“…For typical agricultural scenarios, soil-to-plant transfer factors can be used to predict the radionuclide levels one might expect to see in edible and non-edible plant tissues [see, for example, (Tagami and Uchida, 2009) for 226 Ra]. Such relationships also can be experimentally established for rooting substrates other than typical soils (e.g., UMT) where chemical processing can change the bioavailability of radionuclides or trace elements [see, for example, (Soudek et al, 2007) for flora growing at a UMT site in the Czech Republic]; studies such as these can be used to assess possible food chain exposures to consuming humans, domesticated animals, and wildlife, as well as to identify plants that may have utility in phytoremediation of such sites. Phytoremediation-or more specifically here ''phytoextraction''-uses terrestrial plants to remove contaminants from soils into harvestable plant biomass to decontaminate the soil over time with multiple cropping.…”

“…This situation is good from a perspective of a lower concentration of U in the aboveground tissue being incorporated into the food chain by grazing animals, but bad in terms of phytoextraction of U from the substrate tailings. Work by Soudek et al (2007) on trees growing at a UMT site is illustrative of issue (2). The leaves of birch trees (Betula pendula) at this UMT site were shown to take up quantities of 226 Ra [up to 0.4 Bq/g dry weight (11 pCi/g)] greater than those of other trees at the site.…”