Publications

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Following the radionuclide release event of February 14, 2014 at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), actinide contamination has been found on the walls and floor in Panel 7 as a result of a release in Room 7 of Panel 7. It has been proposed to decontaminate Panel 7 at the WIPP by washing contaminated surfaces in the underground with fresh water. A cost-effective cleanup of this contamination would allow for a timely return to waste disposal operations at WIPP. It is expected that the fresh water used to decontaminate Panel 7 will flow as contaminated brine down into the porosity of the materials under the floor – the run-of-mine (ROM) salt above Marker Bed 139 (MB139) and MB139 itself – where its fate will be controlled by the hydraulic and transport properties of MB139. Due to the structural dip of MB139, it is unlikely that this brine would migrate northward towards the Waste-Handling Shaft sump. A few strategically placed shallow small-diameter observation boreholes straddling MB139 would allow for monitoring the flow and fate of this brine after decontamination. Additionally, given that flow through the compacted ROM salt floor and in MB139 would occur under unsaturated (or two-phase) conditions, there is a need to measure the unsaturated flow properties of crushed WIPP salt and salt from the disturbed rock zone (DRZ).

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Significant laboratory and in situ testing has been conducted by both the United States and Germany on salt disposal of heat-generating radioactive waste. Coupled simulation capabilities recently developed in other fields are now being applied to repository design and performance confirmation. New efforts are underway to benchmark this latest generation of numerical models, requiring quality validation datasets. Datasets associated with historic high-level waste (HL W) field experiments at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, Avery Island in Louisiana, Asse II in Germany, and Project Salt Vault in Kansas should be considered before constructing new experiments. We constructed an online bibliographic database using the web reference database (Refbase) distribution to contain references to reports, and conference papers, along with associated electronic copies of reports and associated data. The database was populated using publically available Department of Energy sources and project-specific archives scanned for this project. The browser-based database facilitated an extensive collaborative review of experiments in geologic salt-primarily concerning heated salt that may be applicable to modern code validation efforts. We summarize historic in situ tests conducted in geologic salt, focusing on heated salt creep, heated brine migration, and crushed salt reconsolidation. We propose several candidate thermal, mechanical, and hydrological validation datasets for salt behavior under repository conditions.

The article briefly summarizes the siting history of salt nuclear waste repositories as it relates to the research that has been conducted in support of this overall mission. Project Salt Vault was a solid-waste disposal demonstration in bedded salt performed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Lyons, Kan. The US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) intended to convert the project into a pilot plant for the storage of high-level waste. Despite these intentions, nearby solution mining and questionably plugged oil and gas boreholes resulted in the abandonment of the Lyons site. With help from the USGS, in 1972 ORNL began looking in the Permian Basin for a different disposal site in Texas or New Mexico. The WIPP project was discontinued in 1974 in favor of concentrating efforts on a Retrievable Surface Storage Facility. After the demise of that project in 1975, work resumed on WIPP and its scope was temporarily expanded to include defense HLW. A location a few miles northeast of the current WIPP site was chosen for further study.

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This report is a summary of the physical processes, primary governing equations, solution approaches, and historic testing related to brine migration in geologic salt. Although most information presented in this report is not new, we synthesize a large amount of material scattered across dozens of laboratory reports, journal papers, conference proceedings, and textbooks. We present a mathematical description of the governing brine flow mechanisms in geologic salt. We outline the general coupled thermal, multi-phase hydrologic, and mechanical processes. We derive these processes governing equations, which can be used to predict brine flow. These equations are valid under a wide variety of conditions applicable to radioactive waste disposal in rooms and boreholes excavated into geologic salt.

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Hydrologic characterization at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), near Carlsbad, New Mexico, has historically focused on collection of geologic data, such as cores and borehole geophysical logs, and the estimation of hydrologic parameters from single- and multi-well aquifer tests. These data have resulted in a detailed understanding of the depositional and alteration processes that have affected the hydrologie units of interest at WIPP. The hydrologie conceptual model has been used to create a groundwater flow and radionuclide transport model used in WIPP performance assessment (PA). Long-term monitoring of a large network of monitoring wells between testing events has produced millions of high-frequency, long-duration water level records. Hydrologie analysis techniques associated with barometric, Earth tide, and precipitation signals, these long-term data have the potential to reveal additional insights about the large-scale hydrogeology of the formations near WIPP. This study emphasizes that hydrological and geophysical data and analysis is important on multiple temporal and spatial scales in order to achieve effective characterization.

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