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Fry Canyon Remediation

Project Chief: David Naftz, USGS Salt Lake City, Utah
Period of Project: October 2003 to September 2009

Fry Canyon Poster

View the contents of the Fry Canyon Poster.

PROBLEM

Potable ground-water supplies worldwide are contaminated or threatened by advancing plumes containing radionuclides and metals. Passive in-situ chemical barriers may offer a cost-effective alternative or supplement to pump-and-treat technologies for controlling ground-water contamination. An in-situ chemical barrier is a permeable zone of reactive materials that is placed in the subsurface to remove ground-water contaminants and results in clean ground water exiting from the treatment zone. Laboratory experiments have indicated the usefulness of chemical barriers; however, field demonstrations of these technologies are needed to test their usefulness for ground-water clean up. Abandoned and un-reclaimed tailings from uranium-upgrading and copper-leaching operations adjacent to Fry Creek provide a site for the field demonstration of chemical-barrier technology to remove uranium from ground water. The Fry Canyon site is located on Bureau of Land Management property.

OBJECTIVES

There are six objectives to for this project.

1. Determine the approximate volume of tailings material and mass of U associated with the tailings at the Fry Canyon site.
2. Water quality, microbiological, and water-level monitoring of three permeable reactive barriers for two years.
3. Evaluation and monitoring of the hydrologic performance of three permeable reactive barriers.
4. Characterization of the solid-phase geochemistry of three permeable reactive barriers.
5. Testing of in-situ techniques for stabilization of permeable reactive barriers.
6. Technology transfer.

APPROACH

Three permeable reactive barriers (PRBs) were installed at the demonstration site in 1997. The project will utilize geochemical and hydrologic approaches to assess the performance of the PRBs. This performance data will be utilized to address the long-term remediation of the Fry Canyon upgrade tailings site.