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A critical review on radioactive waste management through biological techniques

  • Recent Advancements in Chemical, Environmental and Energy Engineering
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Abstract

Our world is subject to various kinds of pollution and contamination due to rapid growth and development of industrialization. Though, industries are helping to improve the human life style in many ways in day to day life such as power generation to treatment of diseases. At the same time, industries emit the waste which causes major environmental pollution and leads to harmful for all living organism. As the renewable energy sources are depleting, energy/power generation become a major research around the world. Nuclear energy is one of the promising energy to sort out the energy demand, but the problem associated with the nuclear energy is the management and treatment of radioactive waste/emission/effluent since which is more dangerous to all living organism. There is a large scale contamination of radioactive waste associated for the past 60 years of global nuclear activity. It is necessary to pay special attention to the management of radioactive wastes in order to approach pollution-free environment and avoid diseases to living organism through various clean-up strategies. In this review, we discussed the wide ranges of strategies available for radioactive waste management such as physical, chemical, and biological methods. Bioremediation may be the powerful tool for treatment of radioactive wastes. Additionally, discussed on recent advancement have been made in treatment of radioactive waste through microbial transformation as well as phytoremediation which play a major role in disposal of radioactive waste.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the King Khalid University and Sree Sastha Institute of Engineering & Technology for offering their support. In addition, I would like to thank our co-authors who gather ideas and helped throughout the work. Finally, we would like to thank our family and friends for their cooperation and support which helped us to successfully complete our review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, King Khalid University, Abha, 61421, Saudi Arabia

    Varagunapandiyan Natarajan

  2. Department of Biotechnology, Sree Sastha Institute of Engineering & Technology, Chembarambakkam, Chennai, 600 123, India

    Mahalakshmi Karunanidhi & Balamanikandan Raja

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  1. Varagunapandiyan Natarajan
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  2. Mahalakshmi Karunanidhi
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  3. Balamanikandan Raja
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Correspondence to Varagunapandiyan Natarajan.

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Natarajan, V., Karunanidhi, M. & Raja, B. A critical review on radioactive waste management through biological techniques. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 29812–29823 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-08404-0

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