Abstract
Waste site cover systems used to prevent rainfall from reaching the waste need to remain intact throughout the lifetime of the waste site. Monitoring of these covers is needed to ascertain the performance and to determine if any degradation has occurred. Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have used gaseous perfluorocarbon tracers (PFTs) to monitor the integrity of caps and covers for waste disposal sites. Detection of the PFTs currently uses gas chromatography techniques developed at BNL. This paper presents a potential approach to this wide-area screening problem by replacing conventional gas chromatography analysis with laser-based, lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) detection of the PFTs. Lidar can be used to scan the surface of the cover system, looking for fugitive PFTs. If successful this would enable the departure from soil gas analysis and instead look for PFTs in the air just above the soil surface. The advantages of using a lidar platform are multi-fold and include the elimination of soil monitoring ports.
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