Measuring Ground Water Movement With Radioactive and Chemical Tracers

Chlorine-36 in the Terrestrial Environment

“…This has been interpreted as temporary retention of tritium in an immobile water phase around clay particles (Kaufman and Orlob, 1956;Biggar and Nielsen, 1962;Krupp et al, 1972). Longer-term experiments have also shown that tritium may actually exchange with clay hydroxyls or become incorporated in the clay lattice, resulting in a more or less permanent fixation (Stewart, 1967;Rabinowitz et al, 1971).…”

Hydrology of Brookhaven National Laboratory and vicinity, Suffolk County, New York

“…) This factor, and also a tendency of the tracer to become trapped in stagnant water above the screen in the observation well, is probably responsible for the asymmetric time-concentration curve and makes average arrival time later than the peak. The same effect can result from adsorption and elution of the tracer (Kaufman and Orlob, 1956), but laboratory tests did not show much adsorption of chloride by Brookhaven upper Pleistocene sand. The travel time from the second well to the third well was 18 days and the distance 5.37 feet, or a rate of 0.3 foot per day.…”

Quality of Water from Hand Dug Wells in Onitsha Metropolitan Areas of Nigeria

“…They are located 11 m away from septic tank; while the remaining five wells are located close to dump sites. According to Kaufman and Orlob (1955), Cl is a common constituent of pollution mobility in ground water. Septic tank leacheate pollutes ground water with Cl (Sandhu et al, 1976;Rajgopal, 1978;Adegoke, 1990;Obasi and Balogun, 2001).…”