Effect of water content on strontium retardation factor and distribution coefficient in Chinese loess

Geological burial and landfill are often employed for disposal of nuclear wastes. Typically, radionuclides from nuclear facilities transport through the unsaturated zone before reaching the groundwater aquifer. However, transport studies are often conducted under saturated and steady-state flow conditions. This research aimed to examine the effects of unsaturated flow conditions and soil water content (θ) on Sr sorption and retardation in Chinese loess through 1D column transport experiments. Reagent SrCl2 was used as a surrogate for the radioactive isotope ((90)Sr) in the experiment because of their analogous adsorption and transportation characteristics. The spatial distribution of Sr along the column length was determined by segmenting the soil bed and analysing the Sr content in each soil segment following each column breakthrough test. The single-region (SR) and two-region (TR) models were employed to interpret the transport data of Sr as well as a tracer (Br(-)), which resulted in the dispersion coefficient (D) and retardation factor (Rd) under a given set of unsaturated flow conditions. For the tracer, the SR and TR models offered nearly the same goodness of fitting to the breakthrough curves (R(2) ≈ 0.97 for both models). For the highly sorptive Sr, however, the TR model provided better fitting (R(2), 0.80-0.96) to the Sr retention profiles than the SR model (R(2), 0.20-0.89). The Sr retention curves exhibited physical non-equilibrium characteristics, particularly at lower water content of the soil. For the unsaturated soil, D and the pore water velocity (v) displayed a weak linear correlation, which is attributed to the altering dispersivity as the water content varies. A much improved linear correlation was observed between D and v/θ. The retardation factor of Sr increased from 69.1 to 174.2 as θ decreased from 0.46 to 0.26 (cm(3) cm(-3)), while the distribution coefficient (Kd) based on Rd remained nearly unchanged at various θ levels. These results illustrated that water content must be taken into account in determining radionuclide Rd values in Chinese loess, while Kd values can be derived from the unsaturated column experiments and can be considered constant at various levels of θ.