• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.87-96
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• 2007

Risk assessment was carried out in order to improve the remediation and management strategy on a contaminated gunnery site, where a flood control reservoir is under construction nearby. Six chemicals, including explosive chemicals and heavy metals, which were suspected to possess risk to humans by leaching events from the site were the target pollutants for the assessment. A site-specific conceptual site model was constructed based on effective, reasonable exposure pathways to avoid any overestimation of the risk. Also, conservative default values were adapted to prevent underestimation of the risk when site-specific values were not available. The risks of the six contaminants were calculated by API's Decision Support System for Exposure and Risk Assessment with several assumptions. In the crater-formed-area(Ac), the non-carcinogenic risks(i.e., HI values) of TNT(Tri-Nitro-Toluene) and Cd were slightly larger than 1, and for RDX(Royal Demolition Explosives), over 50. The total non-carcinogenic risk of the whole gunnery range calculated to a significantly high value of 62.5. Carcinogenicity of Cd was estimated to be about $10^{-3}$, while that of Pb was about $5\;{\times}\;10^{-4}$, which greatly exceeded the generally acceptable carcinogenic risk level of $10^{-4}{\sim}10^{-6}$. The risk assessment results suggest that an immediate remediation practice for both carcinogens and non-carcinogens are required before the reservoir construction. However, for more accurate risk assessment, more specific estimations on condition shifts due to the construction of the reservoir are required, and more over, the effects of the pollutants to the ecosystem is also necessary to be evaluated.