Los Alamos National Laboratory groundwater Plume Remediation

Department of Energy

Neptune has multiple groundwater modeling projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), including a hexavalent chromium plume and a Royal Demolition Explosive (RDX) plume. These projects require modeling a deep vadose zone, as well as the underlying aquifer, while managing large uncertainties regarding contaminant source magnitude and location. Both models utilize a sophisticated, high-dimensional calibration method that seeks to match time histories for both water levels and contaminant concentrations at a network of observation wells. Neptune built and manages an in-house, high performance cluster to facilitate the calibration. These projects utilize a finite-element heat and mass (FEHM) model, developed by LANL. FEHM is a robust groundwater modeling code that supports saturated and unsaturated media, non-isothermal multiphase flow, and transport of reactive and sorbing solutes. Neptune staff have contributed additions and corrections to the FEHM source code.