Preliminary Experimental Analysis of Soil Stabilizers for Contamination Control

A major focus of Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) environmental management mission at the Hanford site involves characterizing and remediating contaminated soil and groundwater; stabilizing contaminated soil; remediating disposal sites; decontaminating and decommissioning structures, and demolishing former plutonium production process buildings, nuclear reactors, and separation plants; maintaining inactive waste sites; transitioning facilities into the surveillance and maintenance program; and mitigating effects to biological and cultural resources from site development and environmental cleanup and restoration activities. For example, a total of 470,914 metric tons of contaminated soil from 100 Areas remediation activities were disposed at the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF) during 2004 [5]. The Applied Research Center (ARC) at Florida International University (FIU) is supporting the Hanford’s site remediation program by analyzing the effectiveness of several soil stabilizers (fixatives) for contamination control during excavation activities. The study is focusing on determining the effects of varying soil conditions, temperature, humidity and wind velocity on the effectiveness of the candidate stabilizers. The test matrix consists of a soil penetration-depth study, wind tunnel experiments for determination of threshold velocity, and temperature and moisture-controlled drying/curing experiments. These three set of experiments are designed to verify performance metrics, as well as provide insight into what fundamental forces are altered by the use of the stabilizer. This paper only presents the preliminary results obtained during wind tunnel experiments using dry Hanford soil samples (with 2.7% moisture by weight). These dry soil samples were exposed to varying wind speeds from 2.22 m/sec to 8.88 m/sec. Furthermore, airborne particulate data was collected for the dry Hanford soil experiments using an aerosol analyzer instrument.