Effectiveness of Engineered Covers: From Modeling to Performance Monitoring

The goal of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of engineered covers and barrier systems for decommissioning low-level waste disposal and uranium mill tailing sites. The objectives are to assess, based on analyzing the data and test results from the test site exhumation program, how the geotechnical and hydraulic properties of the cover system change over time, and how those changes influence the long-term performance effectiveness of the cover system. The specific issues to be identified and evaluated are: (1) the temporal changes in the hydraulic properties of the cover materials; (2) the effectiveness of monitoring programs used to verify cover performance predicted from simulation modeling; (3) the methods to identify and analyze features, events, and processes that cause degradation failures to the systems, structures and components, and increased percolation through covers; and (4) soil types, design, modeling, construction and monitoring techniques that will result in improving the predictive performance of covers.