A common ecological risk assessment on freshwaters for chemical and radiological ecotoxicity: the uranium case

As there is no scientific reason to discriminate between chemicals and radioactive substances in terms of environmental risk assessment methodology (ERA), it is now generally recognised (Garnier-Laplace et al., 2006) that the classical ERA method (EC, 2003) may be applied to both of these substances. This is of particular interest in the case of uranium that presents a double ecotoxicity, chemical and radiological, leading until now to separate environmental impact and risk assessments that did not provide a global view of the ecological state of the target ecosystem. It is therefore more effective and more efficient to apply a single method to evaluate the ecological risk due to both potential chemotoxicity and radiotoxicity of uranium, following the classical four-step methodology (problem formulation, effect and exposure analysis, risk characterisation; EC, 2003).