At IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Boris Faybishenko (Earth & Environmental Sciences, LBNL) participated in a July 2015 workshop on preparation of an IAEA Technical Report on Remediation of Groundwater and Acid and Metalliferous Drainage (AMD) at Uranium Mining Sites. Boris, who is an IAEA Technical Expert, and colleagues from Australia, Canada, USA and Czech Republic, will be preparing this report over the next two years. At Boris’ suggestion, the working group plans to incorporate the lessons learned and tools developed through—
- Sustainable Systems SFA2.0 (supported by DOE BER)
- ASCEM—Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (supported by DOE EM)
This report will provide guidance to more than 100 countries, many working with limited resources, on how to address their challenges in remediating contaminated groundwater from uranium mining sites.
DOE-BER’s Sustainable Systems 2.0 offers the international community several use case studies on:
- Bioremediation of uranium-contaminated groundwater at Rifle, CO
- Development of a Data Management and Assimilation (DMA) System to enable integration, synthesis and quality control for diverse and disparate data sets.
DOE-EM’s ASCEM project can provide tools—
- Numerical simulation codes, including software AMANZI, and visualization, data management (quality control and standardization) capabilities
- Models and monitoring methods derived from the experience of the Site Application Working Group, such as attenuation-based remedies at the Savannah River Site F Area and evaluation of remediation and natural attenuation approaches for uranium-contaminated groundwater
These lessons learned and tools are available to the international community, where they can be leveraged to address not only remediation of past contamination, but also to accidents large and small. At the same time, the data-rich uranium mining community will take advantage of opportunities to test ASCEM capabilities on complex remediation problems.
Source: Boris Faybishenko