Evaluation Of The Transport Of Norm Contaminants In The Air And Saturated Underground Zone Of The City of Aldama, Mexico

摘要

In this study, it was postulated that naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) concentrations in air, soil, and Aldama City waters due to uranium and thorium must have some anthropogenic component. This suggests that it may have been a bad decision to locate the URAMEX plant, the current Majalca Processor, on the grounds, upstream of the hydrological basin of the Chuviscar River. To achieve the objective of studying NORM contamination, the modeling provided by WRPLOT (Tee J., 2016), CALVIEW (Cire, J., CALPro Plus. 2011) and HYDRUS-1D (Simunek, J., 2008) were used to determine the following: i) Dispersion of pollutants from NORM wastes that were stored and dispensed from piles of waste and the oxidation pond (sources) and that somehow were reaching the surface of the city soil, to the unsaturated zone and subsequently to the groundwater zone. ii) Dispersion of anthropogenic radioisotopes without a defined source. This reference is made because of the vertical transport of ~(137)Cs from the total area of the city to the underlying layers of the unsaturated zone. The 1986 Chernobyl and 2011 Fukushima accidents are responsible of these events (Medvedev, A. 1990). (Carbonell, EF 2013). iii) Drainage flow values obtained at different depths in a simulated way for the determination the possible contamination of the soil layers (root layer) until the termination of the vadose zone where the displacement of the groundwater flows begins.