The session will focus on the processes, their modeling and parameterization that are governing the radionuclide transport through the buffer, backfill and host rock / cap rock. Contributions providing thermodynamic data of (bio)geochemical systems and fundamental understanding of the underlying molecular processes relevant for the long-term safety assessment of nuclear waste disposal are welcome in this session. Presentations are invited on both numerical and analytical approaches to reactive transport processes at the pore scale and beyond.
Themes:
- Identification of significant deficits in process understanding and strategies for advancing the state of knowledge
- Gaps in thermodynamic databases: relevance, use of estimation methods (primarily related to speciation, solubility, sorption)
- Methodological developments (detection limits, data processing and interpretation, multilateral procedures, upscaling in complexity, time and space)
- Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses, geostatistics
- Analysis of material heterogeneities that critically control sorption processes in geomaterials
- Parameterization of reactive transport models, validation of numerical approaches
Goals:
The contributions shall focus on those phenomena that are either in general essential to the radionuclide transport or that have currently large uncertainties rendering them especially critical. Strategies and methodologies to treat them in a way to make safety assessments more realistic and less uncertain shall be derived and discussed.