A Nuclear Age

Vol. 35-1

1993.03

One of the most vital and persistent public health challenges facing local, state, and national governments is the disposal of solid waste produced from industrial, utility, and municipal sources. There is a growing interest in the monitoring, control, and safe disposal of the chemical constituents arising from these sources. For instance, it is now well known that the release of by products from coal-fired power plants - namely airborne particulates, bottom ash, and fly ash - can have adverse effects on air and water quality. It is therefore important that reliable chemical analytical techniques are readily available to assess the impact of widespread disposal practices of organic and inorganic chemicals. The use of nuclear and nuclear-related analytical techniques - such as neutron activation analysis, energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence and particle induced X-ray emission - have become widespread in major areas of science and technology. These methods and techniques have important applications in such work since they can be used for both the determination of specific individual pollutants (e.g. toxic heavy metals) and multi-elemental analyses for source identification and apportionment purposes. Other nuclear techniques, such as isotope tracers, have also had wide acceptance in characterizing diffusion patterns for metals in soil and aqueous environments and water pollution flows. 1 graph., 1 tab