Initial work at Sandia National Laboratories in spatial statistics began on the Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project. Geostatistical techniques were used in the late 80s and early 90s to model the spatial variation of rock properties (e.g., matrix porosity, fracture frequency, thermal conductivity) in a set of variably welded volcanic rocks at the Yucca Mountain site. These rock property models were used to guide additional sampling for the site characterization and also as input to groundwater flow and radionuclide transport models.
During the early 90s, Sandia's work with geostatistical techniques began to focus on problems of soil contamination at cold war legacy production plants. This work centered on working with DOE facilities around the U.S. to characterize and remediate soils prior to turning the land over to the public domain. The SmartSampling program was created to implement this work. Results of this work included mapping the probability of exceeding multiple proposed remediation thresholds, application of cost-risk decision frameworks to problems of characterization and remediation of soils and technology transfer through short courses.
In the past few years, the spatial statistics group at Sandia National Laboratories has branched out into other areas of spatial modeling and spatial statistics. As well as continuing to solve problems on the Yucca Mountain and SmartSampling programs, other areas of research and development include site characterization of proposed international nuclear waste repositories, detecting the spatial-temporal evolution of epidemics through populations and development of statistically-based site characterization protocols for unexploded ordnance (UXO) sites.
