Hydrogel-Encapsulated Soil: A Tool to Measure Contaminant Attenuation In Situ

After intervals of groundwater immersion, polyacrylamide hydrogel-encapsulated solid specimens were retrieved, assayed non-destructively for uranium and other elements using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, and replaced in groundwater for continued reaction. Desorption dynamics of uranium from contaminated soils and other solids, when moved to uncontaminated groundwater, were fit to a general two-component kinetic retention model with slow-release and fast-release fractions of the total uranium. In a group of Oak Ridge soils with varying ambient uranium contamination (169-1360 mg/kg), the uranium fraction retained under long-term in situ kinetic behavior was strongly correlated (r2 = 0.89) with the residual uranium retained after laboratory sequential extraction of water-soluble and cation-exchangeable fractions of the same soils. To illustrate how potential remedial techniques can be compared to natural attenuation, thermal stabilization of one soil increased the size of its long-term retained fraction from 50 to 88% of the total uranium and increased the in situ retention half-life of the long-term retained fraction from 990 to 40,000 days. Hydrogel encapsulation presents a novel and powerful general method to observe many water-solids interactions in situ for a variety of aqueous media besides groundwater, with a variety of non-destructive analytical methods, and with a variety of solids besides contaminated soil.