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Abstract
The possibility of decontaminating arable soil, forest soil, and gley soil, artificially contaminated by solutions of cesium-137, strontium-85, and europium-152, by contact in common suspension with magnetic residues of leached nickel ores (SOR) from the former Sered hydrometallurgical plant and its magnetic separation was demonstrated. More than 60–98% of cesium and strontium took part in the exchange between the soil and the magnetic sorbent and could be efficiently removed at sorbent mass to soil mass ratio as large as 5. Freundlich sorption isotherms were used for the evaluation of the driving forces of the transfer process. Actual soil remediation depends on the possibility of recycling used SOR: the speciation of sorbate indicates that the retention of strontium takes place in an exchangeable form but that of cesium and europium manifests through a more strong binding to the oxide component of SOR.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful for the NATO Linkage Project Grant 974580. F.M. would also like to thank the Slovak VEGA Grant Agency for the grant 1/7250/20, and the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic for the grant VVNATO97458. Dr. Stefan Jakabsky and Dr. Slavomir Hredzak from the Institute of Geotechnics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Kosice are thanked for the mill activation of the magnetic sorbent, and Ms. Petra Micekova for her valuable help with the experimental work.