Near Real-Time Two and Three-Dimensional Electrical Geophysical Monitoring of Natural and Engineered Processes Associated with Subsurface Remediation - 16052

Conference · Fri Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2016

OSTI ID:22837959

Johnson, Tim; Thomle, Jon ^[1]; Baynes, Patrick; Hermann, Randy ^[2]

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1. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (United States)
2. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company (United States)

Legacy soil and groundwater contamination associated with nuclear weapons production is projected to be one of the largest cleanup liabilities to the U.S. Department of Energy for the foreseeable future. Remediation of subsurface contaminants is complicated by the combined effects of geochemical heterogeneity, geological heterogeneity, and the difficulty and expense of adequate borehole access. Each of these complications contributes to uncertainty in the distribution of contaminants and the performance of in situ treatments, which increases risk to human health and the environment and cost to closure in general. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is a method of remotely imaging the electrical properties of the subsurface, which are governed by both geochemical and geological structure, thereby providing useful proxies for understanding contaminant distribution and the behavior in situ remediation processes. Recent advancements in both data collection and data processing capabilities are enabling ERT monitoring to be executed and provided to site operators in near real-time. To summarize the process, ERT surveys are rapidly and continuously collected during a time-sensitive operation such as an amendment injection. At the completion of each survey, data are transferred by wireless internet to offsite supercomputing resources for parallel tomographic inversion. Inversion results are then transferred back to onsite operators and/or other locations for visualization. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of time-lapse ERT for monitoring fluid transport (both gas and liquid phase). We then demonstrate two real-time imaging applications for monitoring both natural and engineered processes at the Hanford Site within the vadose and the saturated zones. We expect this new capability for autonomous real-time imaging to enable ERT to be used as a cost-effective, short-term rapid feedback mechanism for guiding subsurface remediation injections, in addition to longer term monitoring of post-injection performance and environmental impact, all using the same electrode array and instrumentation. (authors)

• Research Organization: WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 27646, 85285-7646 Tempe, AZ (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22837959
• Report Number(s): INIS-US--19-WM-16052
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
BOREHOLES
CONTAMINATION
COST
DATA PROCESSING
DISTRIBUTION
ELECTRIC CONDUCTIVITY
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
GROUND WATER
HAZARDS
INJECTION
MONITORING
NUCLEAR WEAPONS
OPERATION
REMEDIAL ACTION
RESOURCES
SOILS
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
TOMOGRAPHY
USA