Abstract
River sediments are archives for past water contaminations. This is shown for the catchment of the Mulde River draining major parts of the Erzgebirge, Saxony, Germany. Mining activities have been impacting this part of Germany for over 850 years. It started with silver, then changing to lead, cadmium, zinc, tin, tungsten and copper. Finally, after 1945 a big uranium boom took place in this ar-ea which was led by the Soviet Union and the company SAG Wismut /SDAG Wismut, respectively. Until 1990 this area and parts of Thuringia produced 231,400 t of uranium and for this time period made the GDR the third biggest uranium producer of the world. Field work in 2011 revealed that both water and sediments still contain significant concentrations of uranium, cadmium, zinc, arsenic and other mining-related elements. Factor and cluster analysis has been used to visualize the data. Certain areas such as the former Freiberg mining area are high in lead, arsenic and cadmium but low in uranium. On Contrary, those areas where uranium ore was mined still show high uranium concentration in both water and sediments.
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Nestler, K., Merkel, B. (2015). Mulde River - A Uranium Mining Archive. In: Merkel, B., Arab, A. (eds) Uranium - Past and Future Challenges. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11059-2_96
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11059-2_96
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