Since the first human release of
radionuclides on Earth at the
end of the Second World War, impact assessments have been implemented.
Radionuclides are now ubiquitous, and the impact of local accidental
release on human activities, although of low probability, is of tremendous
social and economic consequences. Although radionuclide inventories
(at various scales) are essential as input data for impact assessment,
crucial information on physicochemical speciation is lacking. Among
the metallic radionuclides of interest, cobalt-60 is one of the most
important activation products generated in the nuclear industry. In
this work, a marine model ecosystem has been defined because seawater
and more generally marine ecosystems are final receptacles of metal
pollution. A multistep approach from quantitative uptake to understanding
of the accumulation mechanism has been implemented with the sea urchin Paracentrotus lividus. In a well-controlled aquarium,
the day-by-day uptake of cobalt and its quantification in different
compartments of the sea urchin were monitored with various conditions
of exposure by combining ICP-OES analysis and γ spectrometry.
Cobalt is mainly distributed following the rating intestinal tract
≫ gonads > shell spines. Cobalt speciation in seawater and
inside the gonads and the intestinal tract was determined using extended
X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS). The cobalt inside the gonads
and the intestinal tract is mainly complexed by the toposome, the
main protein in the sea urchin P. lividus. Complexation with purified toposome was characterized and a complexation
site combining EXAFS and AIMD (ab initio molecular
dynamics) was proposed implying monodentate carboxylates.