Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
70,000
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
20,000
10,000
0
1940
1960
1980
Ye ar
2000
FIGURE 9.1
Uranium production in the Western world since 1945.
in Germany can be estimated to be 30 Euro/kg U. It should be noted that
uranium concentration in German ores was much lower than those in ores
exploited today (Mudd and Diesendorf 2008). The market price for uranium
is far above this value, thus mining of uranium seems to be feasible in such
a way that external costs can be covered by the price.
Minerals and ores are nonrenewable resources, so mining eventually leads
to their exhaustion. The deposits cannot be regenerated, therefore, a reme-
diation of the environmental damage at mining sites is a basic necessity.
Polluting the environment has not been a privilege of our generation alone:
even the ancient Greeks managed to pollute land and sea with the waste
products of their lead mining, metallurgy, and processing some 2000 years
ago. But increasing speed in development and industrial revolution multi-
plied the amounts and types of emissions, and kept adding more complex
types of contaminant to the established ones: chemicals, toxic heavy metals,
dense nonaqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs), radioactive wastes, and so on.
In doing so, they have generated a steadily increasing threat to our environ-
ment, and our drinking water in particular. In the following sections reme-
diation processes for treating groundwater contaminations arising from
mining and utilization of radionuclides are described. A focus is laid on pas-
sive in situ methods. Active methods such as pump and treat are described
in detail elsewhere (Simon et al. 2002).
9.2 Groundwater Remediation Using Permeable
Reactive Barriers
Soil and groundwater remediation projects often cause high costs due to
their large extent and long duration. This is the reason why a number of
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