Abstract
Waste material in a geologic repository will eventually dissolve and migrate away, degrade by chemical reaction or radioactive decay, or become part of the basic rock material. For many waste components these processes will be limited by the dissolution rate of the waste matrix. The precipitation may be due to local geochemical changes such as changes in temperature, pH, or redox potential, caused by nearby geologic features or the waste itself. In this paper we analyze the effect of contaminant precipitation caused by a drop in the solubility at some specified location away from the waste. Transport is by diffusion only; advection is neglected. Analytical solutions are presented for the contaminant concentration in ground water and the mass‐transfer rate as functions of space and time for regions on both sides of the precipitation front. Numerical illustrations are made applicable to nuclear waste in a geologic repository.
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