Savannah River Site (SRS) houses two large tank farms holding millions of gallons of legacy nuclear waste. Since the 1950s, mercuric nitrate has been used to aid in the dissolution of aluminum cladding of irradiated material. As a result, mercury is present throughout the liquid waste stream. The concentration and species of mercury present must be understood to ensure safe, long-term remediation of the stored waste. An automated process has been developed at Savannah River National Laboratory to separate inorganic, organic, and elemental mercury from a sample and selectively trap species-specific mercury compounds for later analysis. This developed process has been demonstrated to perform with high reproducibility, with recoveries approaching 100%. This method has been validated on externally sourced certified materials (CRM), where available, and in-house prepared solutions where CRMS were not available. This automated and validated method will significantly reduce the total mercury speciation turnaround time by performing each separation in parallel, provide higher precision data by extracting each species from the same prepared sample, and reduce the overall analyst exposure to the highly hazardous nuclear tank waste.

Organic and inorganic mercury speciation in hazardous samples via automated in-vial purge and selective solid-phase trapping

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.