Simulating 10,000 Years of Erosion to Assess Nuclear Waste Repository Performance

Simulating 10,000 Years of Erosion to Assess Nuclear Waste Repository Performance

Blog Article

Long-term air force ocp officer ranks environmental performance assessments of natural processes, including erosion, are critically important for waste repository site evaluation.However, assessing a site’s ability to continuously function is challenging due to parameter uncertainty and compounding nonlinear processes.In lieu of unavailable site data for model calibration, we present a workflow to include multiple sources of surrogate data and reduced-order models to validate parameters for a long-term erosion assessment of a low-level radioactive nuclear waste repository.We apply this new workflow to a low-level waste repository on mesas in Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

To account for parameter uncertainty, we simulate high-, moderate-, and low-erosion cases.The assessment extends to 10,000 years, which results in large erosion uncertainties, but is necessary given the nature of the interred waste.Our long-term erosion analysis shows that high-erosion scenarios produce rounded mesa tops and partially filled canyons, diverging from the moderate-erosion case that results in gullies and sharp mesa rims.Our novel model parameterization workflow and modeling exercise demonstrates the utility of long-term assessments, identifies sources of erosion forecast uncertainty, and demonstrates the utility of landscape evolution model missy minzy development.

We conclude with a discussion on methods to reduce assessment uncertainty and increase model confidence.