Vandana Pulhani

Uranium quantification in groundwater and health risk from its ingestion in Haryana, India

Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element which may cause toxicological or radiological hazards to the public if present in drinking water. This study reports the quantification of uranium in groundwater of major towns of the district Fatehabad, Haryana, India. Uranium concentrations ranged between 0.3 and 48 μg L−1. In 22% of the groundwater samples, uranium concentrations were higher than the World Health Organization maximum permissible limit of 30 µg L−1. The radiological dose for males was found to be in the range of 4.8 × 10−4–7.1 × 10−2 mSv y−1 and for females 3.5 × 10−4–5.2 × 10−2 mSv y−1. The results showed that due to the ingestion of groundwater in the study area, radiological cancer risk is in the range of 9.1 × 10−7–1.3 × 10−4, lower than the risk limit. Uranium ingestion from groundwater varied from 0.02 to 3.5 µg kg−1 day−1, which is within acceptable limit.

Determination of Traces of Uranium and Thorium in Environmental Matrices by Neutron Activation Analysis

Radioactive elements like 232Th and 238U along with their daughter products, form part of all environmental matrices and are getting transferred to living beings by different pathways, leading to a continuous radiation exposure and need to be monitored. This paper presents an analytical methodology, highlighting the need to separate interfering beta- and gamma-emitters from the analytes, when neutron activation analysis is employed for the determination of traces of uranium and thorium in soil and plant materials. The method has been applied to the soil and plant materials from selected regions of India, along with standard reference materials to verify the validity of the proposed separation scheme. The overall reproducibility of the procedure was 2–10%. The concentration values of uranium and thorium so obtained, have been used to calculate transfer factors from soil to various parts of wheat plant.

Applicability of layered metal sulphide for estimation of Sr concentration in groundwater

ABSTRACT A layered metal sulphide reported in the literature was synthesized in the laboratory and characterized. Its applicability for selective uptake of strontium was studied. The experimental conditions for efficient uptake were standardized. The applicability of the metal sulphide for Sr removal/collection from ground water was tested. This method offers the option of lesser analysis time and removes the interferences of Ca.

Analysis of hydrological trend for radioactivity content in bore-hole water samples using wavelet based denoising

A wavelet transform based denoising methodology has been applied to detect the presence of any discernable trend in (137)Cs and (90)Sr activity levels in bore-hole water samples collected four times a year over a period of eight years, from 2002 to 2009, in the vicinity of typical nuclear facilities inside the restricted access zones. The conventional non-parametric methods viz., Mann-Kendall and Spearman rho, along with linear regression when applied for detecting the linear trend in the time series data do not yield results conclusive for trend detection with a confidence of 95% for most of the samples. The stationary wavelet based hard thresholding data pruning method with Haar as the analyzing wavelet was applied to remove the noise present in the same data. Results indicate that confidence interval of the established trend has significantly improved after pre-processing to more than 98% compared to the conventional non-parametric methods when applied to direct measurements.

Studies on matrix interferences during uranium analysis by extractive liquid scintillation technique

The efficiency of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) and diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (DTPA) in reducing the influence of salinity and extraction of iron and calcium into the organic phase along with uranium was studied. DTPA has been observed to be more suitable complexing agent compared to EDTA. Iron and calcium were found to be separated quantitatively with more than 95% recovery for uranium, facilitating its rapid and interference free analysis in the presence of DTPA. Uranium recovery under high salinity conditions was also observed to be in the range 89.7–98.6% in the presence of DTPA.

Sequential analysis of uranium and plutonium in environmental matrices by extractive liquid scintillation spectrometry

Abstract A methodology for sequential separation of uranium (U) and plutonium (Pu) followed by their estimation, using extractive liquid scintillation spectrometry was standardized for matrices like soil, fish and sediment. Various parameters for selective and efficient extraction and separation of Pu and U in the presence of interfering matrix elements with HDEHP bis(2-ethylhexy1) phosphoric acid as an extracting agent were investigated. Quenching effect of the various extracting reagents on resolution of α spectrum of analytes and reduction in these interferences is discussed in the current study. Standardized procedure gave about 91% of extraction of spiked Pu into the organic phase. Performance of the method was tested by separating and estimating U and Pu in International Atomic Agency (IAEA) certified reference materials like soil/sediment/fish.

Direct estimation of 90Sr in water samples of spent fuel storage bay using partial counting rate technique

The direct estimation of 90Sr by β counting from a mixture of other β and γ emitter is often difficult due to the efficiency variation among the β-emitters and the unknown nature of the sample. This paper deals with use of a combination of β and γ spectrometry measurements in estimating the activity of 90Sr, pure β emitter from a mixture of other β–γ emitters in water samples. This procedure offers a simple, easy to use, rapid and a reliable method for 90Sr estimation as an alternative to the tedious radiochemical separation procedure in this specific case.

Authors response to Dr. Rathore’s comments on Singh B, Garg VK, Yadav P, Kishore N, Pulhani V (2014) uranium in groundwater from western Haryana, India. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 301: 427–433

So far, authors have published two articles on uranium quantification in groundwater in India. One manuscript entitled ‘‘Uranium concentration in groundwater in Hisar city, India’’, published in The International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (IJOEM) [1]; and another entitled ‘‘Uranium in groundwater from Western Haryana, India’’, published in Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry [2]. Dr. Rathore has already written a Letter to the Editor of the IJOEM [1]. The appropriate responses were prepared and published in the journal [3]. Now, Dr. Rathore has given comments to the Editor of JRNC on second article, Singh et al. [2]. We believe that these comments have been prepared on the basis of three publications [1–3] although most of the comments have already been responded in the IJOEM [3], we try to make things more clear as follows. 1. Dr. Rathore implies that the information furnished about uranium analysis instrument by Singh et al. [2] is incorrect and misleading. The manuscript, published by Garg et al. [1], in the IJOEM was a correspondence and had a limit of 1,000 words. So, it was impossible to provide all details in the article. However, in response to his Letter to the Editor, published in the IJOEM, it was informed that model UA-1, fluorimeter from Quantalase, India has been used in the study [3]. But now Dr. Rathore has pointed on the basis of the IJOEM response by Garg [3] and JRNC article by Singh et al. [2] that the authors have furnished incorrect information regarding the instrument. This observation is not correct. In this regard it is submitted that in past M/s Quantalase Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., Indore, India manufactured nitrogen laser fluorimeter (Model QL/NLF/ 02) and the same was used by the authors. The work reported in JRNC by Singh et al. [2] has been done using nitrogen laser fluorimeter (Model QL/NLF/02), the details of this model are given in the article Singh et al [2] (Picture of instrument given in Fig. 1). Later on, M/s Quantalase Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., Indore launched another model of fluorimeter, viz, uranium analyser model UA-1 (Picture of instrument given in Fig. 2). The authors procured uranium analyser model UA-1 and the work reported in the IJOEM by Garg et al. [1] has been done using uranium analyser model UA-1. In these two articles [1, 2] different instruments were used for uranium analysis. It is important to note that both the instruments are based on the measurement of the fluorescence of uranium salt. A comparison between nitrogen laser fluorimeter and LED-based uranium analyser model UA-1 is given in Table 1. 2. The authors have mentioned that uranium quantification of the water samples was done as reported by This is the reply to article DOI: 10.1007/s10967-014-3392-7.