New Roles of Subsurface Flow and Reactive Transport Modeling in Environmental Remediation and Waste Isolation

For nuclear waste repository assessments, there has been a challenge of integrating two models at disparate scales: (1) complex thermal-hydrological-geochemical processes in engineered barrier systems (EBS) around each canister at the scale of meters and (2) overall performance assessment (PA) models at the scale of kilometers, including more than ten thousand canisters. We have developed a reduced-order model to capture the temporal evolution of the distribution coefficient (Kd) as a function of hydrological and geochemical parameters, and to provide Kd into the PA models. This integration allows us to evaluate how the uncertainty in EBS parameters could influence the overall performance of a repository, as well as to identify key parameters that dictate the overall performance.

Speaker: Haruko Wainwright, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs