Uranium in the Environment

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XIII

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2. Long-term Aspects of Uranium Mining Remediation

   • Hartmut Biele, Stephanie Hurst

   Pages 1-9

3. Returning the WISMUT Legacy to Productive Use

   • Manfred Hagen, Alexander Thomas Jakubick

   Pages 11-26

4. The Effects of Weathering and Diagenetic Processes on the Geochemical Stability of Uranium Mill Tailings

   • Greg Sinclair, Graham Taylor, Paul Brown

   Pages 27-46

5. Long term fate of uranium tailings in mountain areas

   • Broder J. Merkel

   Pages 47-56

6. Rock phosphates and P fertilizers as sources of U contamination in agricultural soils

   • Sylvia Kratz, Ewald Schnug

   Pages 57-67

7. Monitoring of natural radionuclides in soils as a tool for precision farming - methodical aspects

   • Michael Tauchnitz, Detlev Degering, Carsten Pretzschner, Thomas Wonik, Juergen Boess

   Pages 69-77

8. Electrophoretic characterization of thorium species in very dilute solutions containing humic acid

   • Petr Benes

   Pages 79-86

9. Field Portable and Autonomous Immunosensors for the Detection of Environmental Contaminants

   • Diane A. Blake, Haini Yu, Elizabeth A. James, Xia Li, Robert C. Blake

   Pages 87-95

10. A method to measure arsenic readily released to pore waters from uranium mill tailings

    • John Mahoney, Donald Langmuir, John Rowson

    Pages 97-106

11. Impact of humic acid on the uranium migration in the environment

    • Susanne Sachs, Gerhard Geipel, Jens Mibus, Gert Bernhard

    Pages 107-116

12. Uranium speciation in two Freital mine tailing samples: EXAFS, µ-XRD, and µ-XRF results

    • Andreas C. Scheinost, Christoph Hennig, Andrea Somogyi, Gemma Martinez-Criado, Reinhard Knappik

    Pages 117-126

13. Site characterisation of the potential Natural Analogue Site Heselbach in Bavaria/Germany

    • Dagmar Schönwiese, Thomas Brasser, Ulrich Noseck

    Pages 127-135

14. Speciation of Colloid-borne Uranium by EXAFS and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy

    • Kai-Uwe Ulrich, André Rossberg, Andreas C. Scheinost, Harald Foerstendorf, Harald Zänker, Ulf Jenk

    Pages 137-147

15. Influence of allochthonous plant litter on the fixation of Uranium in sediments

    • Holger Dienemann, Claudia Dienemann, E. Gert Dudel

    Pages 149-157

16. Advanced Investigations of Unconventional Uranium and Thorium Deposits by In-Situ μ-EDXRF Analysis

    • Antje Wittenberg, Ulrich Schwarz-Schampera

    Pages 159-163

17. Depleted Uranium (DU ) — Chemo- and Radiotoxicity

    • Albrecht Schott, Richard A. Brand, Joachim Kaiser, Dietmar Schmidt

    Pages 165-174

18. Effect of uranium and cadmium uptake on oxidative stress reactions for Phaseolus vulgaris

    • Hildegarde Vandenhove, Ann Cuypers, May van Hees, Jean Wannijn

    Pages 175-182

19. Coupled Microbial and Chemical Reactions in Uranium Bioremediation

    • Linda A. Figueroa, Bruce D. Honeyman, James F. Ranville

    Pages 183-190

20. Biotransformation of uranium complexed with organic ligands

    • Arokiasamy J Francis

    Pages 191-197

Uranium is an element to be found ubiquitous in rock, soil, and water. Uranium concentrations in natural ground water can be more than several hundreds µg/l without impact from mining, nuclear industry, and fertilizers. Considering the WHO recommendation for drinking water of 15 µg/l (has been as low as 2 µg/l before) due to the chemical toxicity of uranium the element uranium has become an important issue in environmental research. Besides natural enrichment of uranium in aquifers uranium mining and milling activities, further uranium processing to nuclear fuel, emissions form burning coal and oil, and the application of uranium containing phosphate fertilizers may enrich the natural uranium concentrations in soil and water by far. In October 1995 the first international conference on Uranium Mining and Hydrogeology (UMH I) was held in Freiberg being organized by the Department of Geology at the Technical University Bergakademie Freiberg by the support of the Saxon State Ministry of Geology and Environment. Due to the large scientific interest in the topic of uranium a second conference (UMH II) took place in Freiberg in September 1998. Furthermore, in September 2002 scientists working on the topic of uranium mining and hydrogeology attended the third conference (UMH III) which was jointly held together with the International Mine Water - sociation (IMWA) Symposium 2002. The reviewed papers and posters of the 2002 conference have been published by Springer entitled Uranium in the aquatic en- ronment (edited by Merkel, Planer-Friedrich and Wolkersdorfer).

• Engineering
• Geochemistry
• Geosciences
• Groundwater
• Hydrology
• Microbiology
• Soil Science
• emissions
• environment
• hydrogeology
• mining
• radioactive waste
• remediation
• toxicity
• terrestrial pollution
• water quality and water pollution

From the reviews:

"Andrea Hasche-Berger and Broder J. Merkel did a magnificent job in gathering together 92 contributions within a short time interval for rapid publication. … the book’s figures appear in a good black-and-white quality, and additionally all articles are published in colour on the accompanying CD-ROM, enabling the reader to really use all the figures. … The book is a good source that gives an overview on the international work in the field of uranium … ." (Andreas Winkler, Environmental Geology, Vol. 51, 2006)

• Institut für Geologie, TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Freiberg, Germany

  Broder J. Merkel, Andrea Hasche-Berger

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