From a chemist’s perspective, the environment is a complex, particularly elaborate system. Hundreds of chemically active compounds and minerals reside within the earth’s formations, and every patch of rock and soil is composed of its own particular mix. The waters that flow upon and through these formations harbor a variety of organic and inorganic ligands. Where the water meets the rock is a p...

Partially Lateritised Khondalite (PLK) rocks are the waste materials generated as a result of mining of bauxite. The major discolouring elemental impurity in the PLK is iron oxides, which render it unsuitable for its use as a refractory material. The iron can be removed by suitable beneficiation methods. The main aim of this present investigation is to prepare a value added material from the mi...

Numerical modeling is a critical tool to the U.S. Department of Energy for evaluating the environmental impact of remediation strategies for subsurface legacy waste sites. Unfortunately, the physical and chemical complexity of many sites overwhelms the capabilities of even most state of the art groundwater models. Of particular concern is the representation of highly-heterogeneous stratified ro...

Driverless haulage trucks have recently been developed for open pit mines. To predict the benefits of an Autonomous Haulage System (AHS), a deterministic/stochastic model has been created to compare AHS to a manual system by estimating benchmarked Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as productivity, safety, breakdown frequencies, maintenance and labor costs, fuel consumption, tire wear, and ...

In the framework of the ETNA project, five organizations involved in waste management have harmonized their methodologies for selecting a final set of scenarios to be considered for sensitivity analysis studies. The independent initiating event methodology is based on the production of a limited list of about twenty independent initiating events. The PROSA methodology starts from a comprehensiv...

Based on a comprehensive field study conducted at the Miinchehagen waste disposal site, the groundwater flow and solute transport characteristics of fissured argillites rocks are described. Particularly recent multi-tracer experiments and supplementary laboratory diffusion and batch sorption experiments are presented. The fissured rock behaves as an anisotropic homogeneous continuun with respec...

The concept of disposal of high-level radioactive waste in deep boreholes, and probabilistic performance assessment (PA) of a generic disposal system are described. A series of preliminary PA simulations, conducted to evaluate the possible migration of radionuclides to an accessible environment, are presented. The PA simulations provide estimates of radionuclide releases and mean annual radiati...

In the framework of the ETNA project, five organizations involved in waste management have harmonized their methodologies for selecting a final set of scenarios to be considered for sensitivity analysis studies. The independent initiating event methodology is based on the production of a limited list of about twenty independent initiating events. The PROSA methodology starts from a comprehensiv...