Simulating Bioremediation of Uranium-Contaminated Aquifers

Bioremediation of trace metals in groundwater may require the manipulation of redox conditions via the injection of a carbon source. To simulate the numerous biogeochemical processes that will occur during the bioremediation of trace-metal-contaminated aquifers, a reactive transport model has been developed. The model consists of a set of coupled mass balance equations, accounting for advection, hydrodynamic dispersion, and a kinetic formulation of the biological or chemical transformations affecting an organic substrate, electron acceptors, corresponding reduced species, and trace metal contaminants of interest, uranium in this study. The redox conditions of the domain are characterized by estimating the pE, based on the concentrations of the dominant terminal electron acceptor and its corresponding reduced specie. This pE and the concentrations of relevant species we then used by a modified version of MINTEQA2, which calculates the speciation/sorption and precipitation/dissolution of the species of interest under equilibrium conditions. Kinetics of precipitation/dissolution processes are described as being proportional to the difference between the actual and calculated equilibrium concentration.