Radionuclide Adsorption Performance in Cement and Soil Medium for Safety Issue of Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility

Radionuclide migration from a disposal facility is one of the most crucial factors for protecting man and environment. To ensure safety of a disposal facility, radionuclide migration or adsorption behavior is a key issue in operational and post operational phase. In this perspective, laboratory based column experiments was carried out to investigate theadsorption behavior of radionuclide on the cement and soil mediums. Present experiments simulate the migration behavior of radionuclide through the cement and soil barrier into the environment if the waste packs inside a disposal site encounter rain infiltration. In this study, some simulant cement chunk was produced with a water-cement ratio of 0.50 each, and soil samples were prepared with various grain sizes from 90 µm to 2 mm. In this study adsorption and hence migration behavior of solid spent resin was verified experimentally. In addition, adsorption of two radionuclides, namely 60 Co and 137 Cs was investigated as liquid waste by using the gamma spectrometry analysis. The highest activity distribution of 60 Co at 1173.2 keV and 137 Cs was found in concrete medium 53.49%, and 46.82 in the soil medium, respectively. Thus, locally prepared multiple barriers of cement and soil medium could reasonably be suitable for liquid waste immobilization.