Tetsu K. Tokunaga - Earth and Environmental Sciences Area

Biography

Tetsu Tokunaga is a Senior Scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, studying the physicochemical basis of environmental transport processes. While conducting his graduate studies on gas diffusion in porous media at the University of California, Berkeley, he began working at LBNL on problems of unsaturated flow and transport from uranium mill tailings, and on reactive transport of selenium in contaminated wetland (Kesterson Reservoir). Upon graduation, he continued at LBNL conducting laboratory and field based studies on soil/geologic transport problems. In addition to his research at LBNL, he taught soil physics courses at the University of California, Berkeley. He currently has over 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Research Interests

Tetsu Tokunaga’s research combines soil physics with related fields of hydrogeology and biogeochemistry. His research accomplishments include identifying the general free-path basis for gas diffusion in porous media, the importance of water film hydraulics in multiphase fluid flow, Boltzmann flux distributions in unsaturated rocks, limits for capillary hysteresis, the permeability-sorptivity scaling relation, the unsustainability of reduction-based remediation of uranium contamination, the role of uranyl vanadates in controlling uranium concentrations in oxidizing environments, modeling and measurements of brine film thicknesses under confinement by supercritical CO₂, experimentally identifying limitations of scaling predictions of capillary pressure-saturation relations for supercritical CO₂-brine in porous media, the potential acceleration of soil carbon sequestration through gypsum dissolution, measuring multiphase fluid equilibrium and flow in low permeability shales, and measuring solute diffusion through adsorbed water films.