Reclamation with Recovery of Radionuclides and Toxic Metals from Contaminated Materials, Soils, and Wastes

A process has been developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) for the removal of metals and radionuclides from contaminated materials, soils, and waste sites. In this process, citric acid, a naturally occurring organic complexing agent, is used to extract metals such as Ba, Cd, Cr, Ni, Zn, and radionuclides Co, Sr, Th, and U from solid wastes by formation of water soluble, metal-citrate complexes. Citric acid forms different types of complexes with the transition metals and actinides, and may involve formation of a bidentate, tridentate, binuclear, or polynuclear complex species. The extract containing radionuclide/metal complex is then subjected to microbiological degradation followed by photochemical degradation under aerobic conditions. Several metal citrate complexes are biodegraded, and the metals are recovered in a concentrated form with the bacterial biomass. Uranium forms binuclear complex with citric acid and is not biodegraded. The supernatant containing uranium citrate complex is separated and upon exposure to light, undergoes rapid degradation resulting in the formation of an insoluble, stable polymeric form of uranium. Uranium is recovered as a precipitate (polyuranate) in a concentrated form for recycling or for appropriate disposal. This treatment process, unlike others which use caustic reagents, does not create additional hazardous wastes for disposal and causes little damage to soil which can then be returned to normal use

The photolysis of N2O at 1470 A. Ionospheric research

Photolysis of nitrogen oxide, nitrogen oxide/ nitrogen mixtures, and nitrogen olefin mixture

Explaining how to play real-time strategy games

Real-time strategy games share many aspects with real situations in domains such as battle planning, air traffic control, and emergency response team management which makes them appealing test-beds for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning. End-user annotations could help to provide supplemental information for learning algorithms, especially when training data is sparse. This paper presents a formative study to uncover how experienced users explain game play in real-time strategy games. We report the results of our analysis of explanations and discuss their characteristics that could support the design of systems for use by experienced real-time strategy game users in specifying or annotating strategy-oriented behavior

Overlapping of Ranges of Eastern and Western Hognose Snakes in Southeastern Iowa

Overlapping of ranges of the eastern hognose snake (Heterodon platyrhinos Latreille) and the western hognose snake (Heterodon nasicus nasicus Baird and Girrard) is reported from a sand prairie in Muscatine County, Iowa

The Physiological Implications of Bleaching of Corals Off Southeast Florida

As part of an ongoing study of coral bleaching, observations were made of corals on reefs (ca. 8m) off John U. Lloyd Beach, Dania, FL, in December, 1987. Bleaching was evident in approximately 50% of Montastrea annularis, the dominant scleractinian coral species. Quantitative pigment measurements by HPLC show that bleached corals containe

BNL Citric Acid Technology: Pilot Scale Demonstration

The objective of this project is to remove toxic metals such as lead and cadmium from incinerator ash using the Citric Acid Process developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In this process toxic metals in bottom ash from the incineration of municipal solid waste were first extracted with citric acid followed by biodegradation of the citric acid-metal extract by the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens for metals recovery. The ash contained the following metals: Al, As, Ba, Ca, Cd, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, Ni, Pb, Se, Sr, Ti, and Zn. Optimization of the Citric Acid Process parameters which included citric acid molarity, contact time, the impact of mixing aggressiveness during extraction and pretreatment showed lead and cadmium removal from incinerator ash of >90%. Seeding the treated ash with P. fluorescens resulted in the removal of residual citric acid and biostabilization of any leachable lead, thus allowing it to pass EPA?s Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure. Biodegradation of the citric acid extract removed >99% of the lead from the extract as well as other metals such as Al, Ca, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, Ti, and Zn. Speciation of the bioprecipitated lead by Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure at the National Synchrotron Light Source showed that the lead is predominantly associated with the phosphate and carboxyl functional groups in a stable form. Citric acid was completely recovered (>99%) from the extract by sulfide precipitation technique and the extraction efficiency of recovered citric acid is similar to that of the fresh citric acid. Recycling of the citric acid should result in considerable savings in the overall treatment cost. We have shown the potential application of this technology to remove and recover the metal contaminants from incinerator ash as well as from other heavy metal bearing wastes (i.e., electric arc furnace dust from steel industry) or soils. Information developed from this project is being applied to demonstrate the remediation of lead paint contaminated soils on Long Island

Observation of a narrow structure in p(gamma,K_s)X via interference with phi-meson production

We report observation of a narrow peak structure at ~1.54 GeV with a Gaussian width sigma=6 MeV in the missing of K_s in the reaction gamma+p = pK_sK_L. The observed structure may be due to the interference between a strange (or anti-strange) baryon resonance in the pK_L system and the phi(K_sK_L) photoproduction leading to the same final state. The statistical significance of the observed excess of events estimated as the log likelihood ratio of the resonant signal+background hypothesis and the phi-production based background only hypothesis corresponds to 5.3 sigma.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review C, 9 pages, 11 figures, 1 table added, revise

Microbial Transformations of Actinides and Other Radionuclides

Microorganisms can affect the stability and mobility of the actinides and other radionuclides released from nuclear fuel cycle and from nuclear fuel reprocessing plants. Under appropriate conditions, microorganisms can alter the chemical speciation, solubility and sorption properties and thus could increase or decrease the concentrations of radionuclides in solution in the environment and the bioavailability. Dissolution or immobilization of radionuclides is brought about by direct enzymatic action or indirect non-enzymatic action of microorganisms. Although the physical, chemical, and geochemical processes affecting dissolution, precipitation, and mobilization of radionuclides have been extensively investigated, we have only limited information on the effects of microbial processes and biochemical mechanisms which affect the stability and mobility of radionuclides. The mechanisms of microbial transformations of the major and minor actinides U, Pu, Cm, Am, Np, the fission products and other radionuclides such as Ra, Tc, I, Cs, Sr, under aerobic and anaerobic conditions in the presence of electron donors and acceptors are reviewed