Thermally driven moisture redistribution in partially saturated porous media

Abstract

It is widely recognized that the decay heat produced by high-level radioactive waste (HLW) will likely have a significant impact on both the pre- and post-closure performance of the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain (YM), in southwest Nevada. The task of delineating which aspects of that impact are favorable to isolation performance and which are adverse is an extremely challenging technical undertaking because of such factors as the hydrothermal regimes involved, heterogeneity of the geologic media, and the time and space scales involved. This difficulty has motivated both the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to undertake multi-year thermohydrology research programs to examine the effects of decay heat on pre- and post-closure performance of the repository. Both of these organizations are currently pursuing laboratory and field experiments, as well as numerical modeling studies, to advance the state of knowledge of the thermohydrologic phenomena relevant to the proposed geologic repository. The NRC-sponsored Thermohydrology Research Project, which was initiated in mid-1989 at the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses (CNWRA), began with the intent of addressing a broad spectrum of generic thermohydrologic questions. While some of these questions were answered in the conduct of the study,more » other new and challenging ones were encountered. Subsequent to that report, laboratory-scale experiments were designed to address four fundamental questions regarding thermohydrologic phenomena: what are the principal mechanisms controlling the redistribution of moisture; under what hydrothermal conditions and time frames do individual mechanisms predominate; what driving mechanism is associated with a particular hydrothermal regime; what is the temporal and spatial scale of each hydrothermal regime? This report presents the research results and findings obtained since issuance of the first progress report. 85 refs.« less