Molybdenum Speciation in Uranium Mine Tailings Using X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Uranium (U) mill tailings in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, contain elevated concentrations of molybdenum (Mo). The potential for long-term (>10,000 years) mobilization of Mo from the tailings management facilities to regional groundwater systems is an environmental concern. To assist in characterizing long-term stability, X-ray absorption spectroscopy was used to define the chemical (redox and molecular) speciation of Mo in tailings samples from the Deilmann Tailings Management Facility (DTMF) at the Key Lake operations of Cameco Corporation. Comparison of Mo K near-edge X-ray absorption spectra of tailings samples and reference compounds of known oxidation states indicates Mo exists mainly as molybdate (+6 oxidation state). Principal component analysis of tailings samples spectra followed by linear combination fitting using spectra of reference compounds indicates that various proportions of NiMoO(4) and CaMoO(4) complexes, as well as molybdate adsorbed onto ferrihydrite, are the Mo species present in the U mine tailings. Tailings samples with low Fe/Mo (<708) and high Ni/Mo (>113) molar ratios are dominated by NiMoO(4), whereas those with high Fe/Mo (>708) and low Ni/Mo (<113) molar ratios are dominated by molybdate adsorbed onto ferrihydrite. This suggests that the speciation of Mo in the tailings is dependent in part on the chemistry of the original ore.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
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Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it