RadAqua
In many parts of the world, major regional drinking water resources are represented by large-scale sandstone aquifers. In particular in arid climate zones, such as the Mediterranean Africa, society depends on water from such aquifer systems because of the lack of alternative renewable drinking water resources.
While the fossil (and hence non-renewable) groundwaters of deep sandstone aquifer systems are not likely to show any anthropogenic contamination, sandstone tends to contain elevated concentrations of naturally occurring radionuclides, That has potential impact on the water quality with regard to the groundwater use, giving rise to health related issues.
Hence, designing a smart approach for the assessment and handling of elevated radionuclide activities in groundwater is compulsory. Such an approach must consider smart ways of
- localizing and assessing the contamination,
- careful groundwater abstraction avoiding further radionuclide mobilization,
- state-of-the-art uncomplicated water treatment and
- after-treatment disposal of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM).
The UFM-RadAqua project is intended as initial step for tackling these issues in the “UfM-Countries” Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. The activities focus on scientific networking and preliminary assessment of existing data. Based on the project results of this “pilot phase” a proposal for a follow-up project that will allow actual sampling campaigns has been submitted within the EU call Horizon2020 (WATER-5c-2015).