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2007 Ground Water Summit |
Monday, April 30, 2007 : 10:50 a.m.
Radium in Brackish Water Aquifers in the United States and Middle East: Implications for Drinking Water Treatment and Inland Desalination
Brackish and saline groundwaters represent a significant potential source of drinking waters supplies in water-scarce areas around the world. In some potential sources of drinking water in the United States and the Middle East, the radium concentration in the saline aquifers is high thus presenting additional challenges for water management. The high concentration of radium is typically associated with high salinity, reducing conditions, and low-pH groundwater, although radium anomalies have recently been discovered also in low-saline groundwater. Naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORM) such as radium can be concentrated by more than an order of magnitude by conventional desalination technologies, producing a radioactive waste brine or solid. Information about the natural occurrence of radium in saline aquifers and other potential drinking water as well as the efficacy of alternative treatment processes to remove radium is limited by the high cost of radium analysis and lack of awareness to this problem. Strategies to develop these potential resources must address technical and regulatory aspects of disposal of waste from treatment processes. This presentation will summarize recent studies of the occurrence of radium and other NORM in saline aquifers in the Southwestern United States and in the Middle East. The development of low-cost screening techniques for radium, potential treatment processes and strategies to manage radioactive concentrate will be discussed.
Malcolm D. Siegel, Ph.D., M.P.H., Sandia National Laboratories Malcolm Siegel is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of New Mexico. At Sandia Labs, he has had 25 years of research and project management experience in studies of radionuclide retardation, hydrogeochemistry, performance assessment, environmental remediation and water treatment. He is the author of over 60 scientific articles, book chapters and reports.