A geostatistical modeling study of the effect of heterogeneity on radionuclide transport in the unsaturated zone, Yucca Mountain.

Retardation of certain radionuclides due to sorption to zeolitic minerals is considered one of the major barriers to contaminant transport in the unsaturated zone of Yucca Mountain. However, zeolitically altered areas are lower in permeability than unaltered regions, which raises the possibility that contaminants might bypass the sorptive zeolites. The relationship between hydrologic and chemical properties must be understood to predict the transport of radionuclides through zeolitically altered areas. In this study, we incorporate mineralogical information into an unsaturated zone transport model using geostatistical techniques to correlate zeolitic abundance to hydrologic and chemical properties. Geostatistical methods are used to develop variograms, kriging maps, and conditional simulations of zeolitic abundance. We then investigate, using flow and transport modeling on a heterogeneous field, the relationship between percent zeolitic alteration, permeability changes due to alteration, sorption due to alteration, and their overall effect on radionuclide transport. We compare these geostatistical simulations to a simplified threshold method in which each spatial location in the model is assigned either zeolitic or vitric properties based on the zeolitic abundance at that location. A key conclusion is that retardation due to sorption predicted by using the continuous distribution is larger than the retardation predicted by the threshold method. The reason for larger retardation when using the continuous distribution is a small but significant sorption at locations with low zeolitic abundance. If, for practical reasons, models with homogeneous properties within each layer are used, we recommend setting nonzero K(d)s in the vitric tuffs to mimic the more rigorous continuous distribution simulations. Regions with high zeolitic abundance may not be as effective in retarding radionuclides such as Neptunium since these rocks are lower in permeability and contaminants can only enter these regions through molecular diffusion.