Monitoring the Performance of an Alternative Landfill Cover at the Monticello, Utah, Uranium Mill Tailings Disposal Site
- Environmental Sciences Laboratory, Grand Junction, CO (United States)
- University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States)
- Desert Research Institute, Reno, NV (United States)
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Denver, CO (United States)
The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management (DOE) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) collaborated on the design and monitoring of an alternative cover for the Monticello uranium mill tailings disposal cell, a Superfund site in southeastern Utah. Ground-water recharge is naturally limited at sites like Monticello where thick, fine-textured soils store precipitation until evaporation and plant transpiration seasonally return it to the atmosphere. The cover at Monticello uses local soils and a native plant community to mimic the natural soil water balance. The cover is fundamentally an evapotranspiration (ET) design with a capillary barrier. A 3-hectare drainage lysimeter was embedded in the cover during construction of the disposal cell in 2000. The lysimeter consists of a geo-membrane liner below the capillary barrier that directs percolation water to a monitoring system. Soil water storage is determined by integration of point water content measurements. Meteorological parameters are measured nearby. Plant cover, shrub density, and leaf area index (LAI) are monitored annually. The cover performed well over the 7-year monitoring period (2000-2007). The cumulative percolation was 4.2 mm (0.6 mm yr{sup -1}), satisfying an EPA goal of an average percolation of <3.0 mm yr{sup -1}. Almost all percolation can be attributed to the exceptionally wet winter and spring of 2004-2005 when soil water content slightly exceeded the water storage capacity of the cover. The diversity, percent cover, and LAI of vegetation increased over the monitoring period, although the density of native shrubs that extract water from deeper in the cover has remained less than revegetation targets. DOE and EPA are applying the monitoring results to plan for long-term surveillance and maintenance and to evaluate alternative cover designs for other waste disposal sites. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, 1628 E. Southern Avenue, Suite 9 - 332, Tempe, AZ 85282 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21326132
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-10-WM-08351; TRN: US10V0556067497
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM'08: Waste Management Symposium 2008 - HLW, TRU, LLW/ILW, Mixed, Hazardous Wastes and Environmental Management - Phoenix Rising: Moving Forward in Waste Management, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 24-28 Feb 2008; Other Information: Country of input: France; 58 refs
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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