Environmental and health risk assessment of agricultural areas adjacent to uranium ore fields in Brazil
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Environmental and health risk assessment of agricultural areas adjacent to uranium ore fields in Brazil Juliana A. Galhardi
. Jaime W. V. de Mello . Kevin J. Wilkinson
Received: 17 February 2020 / Accepted: 1 July 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract To investigate the risks posed by trace and rare earth elements (REEs) in two tropical uranium ore fields, metal concentrations from 50 vegetable samples (corn and soybean) and their corresponding agricultural soils were evaluated in a U mining area and a U-rich coal mining area in Brazil. Samples from both areas had metal concentrations (REE: La to Lu, and trace elements: As, Pb, Cd, Ni, Cu, Cr, Mn, Zn, Ba, U, Sr) that were higher than the guidelines proposed by the Brazilian environmental agency. Soils from the U mining area (Poc¸os de Caldas) generally had higher contents of trace elements than the coal mining area (Figueira), with the exception of Ni and Cr, indicating a higher risk of pollution, which was confirmed by a pollution load index that was greater than unity. For both sites, concentrations of uranium in the soil and plants, its hazard quotients and the soil contamination
factor were higher in agricultural fields closer to the mines, indicating that contamination and the consequent risks to human health were distance dependent. REE concentrations averaged 52.8 mg kg-1 in the topsoils and 0.76 mg kg-1 in the grains for Figueira, whereas higher values of 371 mg kg-1 (topsoils) and 0.9 mg kg-1 (grains) were found in Poc¸os de Caldas. Based upon corn and soybean consumption, the estimated intake dose of the REE was lower than the intake dose predicted to be problematic for human health for both sites, indicating limited risk related to the ingestion of REE. Keywords Rare earth elements Uranium Coal mine Hazard quotient Tropical soil
Introduction Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-020-00659-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. J. A. Galhardi (&) K. J. Wilkinson Biophysical Environmental Chemistry Group, Department of Chemistry, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] J. W. V. de Mello Soil Chemistry and Environmental Geochemistry Group, Department of Soil, Federal University of Vic¸osa, Vic¸osa, MG, Brazil
Agricultural soils are considered to be a sensitive ecosystem with respect to the accumulation of toxic metals and their associated risks to human health (Delgado et al. 2012). The potential of mining to impact the quality of agricultural soils has been receiving increased attention worldwide (Abraham et al. 2018), especially with respect to the long-term consumption of contaminated crops (Meryem et al. 2016). For studies involving contamination in the vicinity of mining installations, Cd, Pb, As, Cu, Hg,
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Environ Geochem Health
Fig. 1 Sampling points of the U-rich coal mining area in Figueira, Brazil. The inset represents a
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