Comprehensive approach to the water quality management of large-scale surface liquid radioactive waste storage facilities

Summary

More than half a century a huge stockage of water resources in Russia has been unavailable for economic use. These are water bodies that were given by the USSR Government to the enterprises involved in nuclear weapon development for recycling water supply and utilization of big amounts of liquid radioactive wastes generated daily. The problem of managing the state of the objects with the components characterized by the high level of chemical and radioactive pollution has not been completely solved until now. The main difficulties and perspectives of controlled step-by-step recovery of water resources for economic use are related to large-scale water bodies-liquid radioactive waste storage facilities. The basic principles of the comprehensive approach to the water quality management of polluted water bodies are outlined by the example of the Techa water cascade – the world biggest surface water body-liquid radioactive waste storage facility. The main element of the comprehensive approach to the quality management of the water and bottom sediments of the Techa water cascade is the calculation tooling of the period of assessing the potential hazard of this object by the criteria of specifying the water phase and bottom sediments of the water bodies as liquid and solid radioactive wastes.

Key words

surface water body-storage facility , liquid radioactive wastes , water quality management , radionuclide migration , calculation-monitoring complex