iCONNECT Club: Integrated CONtinuum and NEtwork Approach to Groundwater Flow and Contaminant Transport
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L&211(&7&OXE ,QWHJUDWHG&21WLQXXPDQG1(WZRUN$SSURDFKWR*URXQGZDWHU)ORZ DQG&RQWDPLQDQW7UDQVSRUW David Holton1, Lee J Hartley1, Aimo Hautojärvi2, Paul Marschall3 and Jan-Olof Selroos4. 1 Serco Assurance, 2POSIVA Oy, 3 NAGRA, 4SKB $%675$&7 Models of groundwater flow and transport are routinely used as part of the safety assessment of a site, and increasingly to aid the site investigation strategy and design of a proposed repository. This emphasis puts greater demands on those models to reflect a higher level of realism to incorporate additional information in the vicinity of the repository. This paper describes a successful approach to incorporate these different scales, from canister- to regionalscale, within one model. Such an approach is able to resolve the details of groundwater flow around the waste packages in the overall hydrological setting of the site. ,1752'8&7,21 TheL&211(&7club (integrated CONtinuum and NEtwork approach to groundwater flow and Contaminant Transport) consists of a group of member organisations including the radioactive waste management organisations, SKB, POSIVA, and NAGRA. The objective of the L&211(&7 club is to address a range of generic and site-specific research objectives common to those organisations, related to the evaluation of the performance of the geosphere as part of a site safety assessment. The modelling of groundwater flow and radionuclide transport may also be used to support the site investigation phase leading up to the planning of a repository and the effective design of the repository in addition to evaluating and enhancing the safety of such facilities. The scope of the club’s modelling activities cover a wide range of important topical areas. These activities include: adequacy of data and the development of appropriate conceptual models; the realisation of conceptual models as appropriately detailed numerical models; model flexibility to represent important physical processes; self-consistency issues relating to up- and down-scaling and the nesting of scales; the calibration and conditioning of models using appropriate field data; the validation of models against independent measures; data transfer from, or direct use of the ‘validated’ models as an integrated part of the Performance Safety Assessment (PSA); and approaches and methods to enhance stakeholder communication. This paper describes some of the key achievements of the inaugural year of the L&211(&7 club. The subject and importance of heterogeneity and ‘scale’ has been a prominent feature of research for many years [1]. The many facets of scale are wide ranging, they include: how to use borehole information on a ~10cm scale to understand groundwater flow and radionuclide transport on a site-scale of several km (often referred to as up-scaling); to how several scales may be incorporated into one self-consistent framework. This is of particular importance when disparate length-scales naturally arise, such as is the case of the evaluation of a repository safety assessment from the release of radioa
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