ABSTRACT
The disposal of heat generating nuclear waste is a worldwide concern. Salt formations have been investigated as candidate disposal host rocks for heat-generating nuclear waste for decades. However, brine availability is influenced by heat and can affect the evolution of a nuclear waste disposal facility in salt. For example, brine migration is a potential radionuclide transport vector and brine leads to corrosion of waste forms and waste packages. To better understand brine migration in heated salt, he US Department of Energy’s generic disposal research campaign is conducting borehole heater experiments are being conducted underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. A crucial component of this field test is utilizing numerical models to better understand the system and the data being collected. Meshing and modeling heated, multiphase flow in porous media is a complex and computationally demanding problem. Here we use Voronoi meshing to accurately reproduce the complex 3D geometry of the Brine Availability Test in Salt (BATS) heater test at WIPP. Voronoi elements guarantee accurate fluxes in finite volume simulations, and their distribution is optimized to allow efficient simulation of heat and brine migration during the heating/cooling cycles of the BATS 1a heater test.
