Ravenglass Microbial Community

Sellafield is a site on the northwest coast of England, originally established in 1947 to support the UK nuclear weapons program and located next to the Irish Sea. The Eastern Irish Sea has historical radionuclide contamination from the Sellafield site and radionuclides have been re-dispersed via particulate transport in fine-grained estuarine and intertidal sediments in the North-East Irish sea, including the Ravenglass saltmarsh. The Ravenglass saltmarsh is a dynamic system, with changes in sea level and redox profiles that can impact the speciation and mobility of redox active radionuclides. We aimed to examine the factors affecting the mobility of radionuclides in redox stratified sediments by conducting desorption experiments of contaminated Ravenglass sediments under both toxic and anoxic conditions. The microbial community in these experiments were monitored at select timepoints.