Field Testing Plan for Unsaturated Zone Monitoring and Field Studies

摘要

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has requested development of these field testing plans for evaluating subsurface monitoring systems for low-level radioactive waste disposal sites (LLW) and for monitoring at decommissioned facilities designated under the 'Site Decommissioning Management Plan' (SDMP). The tests are conducted on a 50 m by 50 m plot on the University of Arizona's Maricopa Agricultural Center. Within the 50 m by 50 m plot one finds: (1) an instrumented buried trench, (2) monitoring islands similar to those proposed for the Ward Valley, California LLW Facility, (3) deep borehole monitoring sites, (4) gaseous transport monitoring, and (5) locations for testing non-invasive geophysical measurement techniques. The various subplot areas are instrumented with commercially available instruments such as neutron probes, time domain reflectometry probes, tensiometers, psychrometers, heat dissipation sensors, thermocouples, solution samplers, and cross-hole geophysics electrodes. Measurement depths vary from ground surface to 15 m. The data from the controlled flow and transport experiments will be used to develop an integrated approach to long-term monitoring of the unsaturated zone at waste disposal sites. The data will be used to test field-scale flow and transport models. This report describes the design of the experiment and the methodology proposed for evaluating the data.