Industrial Deployment of Reactive Transport Simulation: An Application to Uranium In situ Recovery

Abstract

The development of reactive transport soared during the 1990’s, driven by the necessity to demonstrate the long-term efficiency of radioactive waste repositories (Bildstein et al. 2019; Claret, 2019; Cama et al. 2019, both this volume). The approach, based on a rigorous description of processes and their coupling, provides a basis of confidence to bridge the gap in time and space between knowledge gained in laboratory experiments and the dimension and lifetime of a high-level waste repository. Reactive transport codes progressively increased in complexity, as more processes were included to account e.g., for variably saturated flow, heat transport and more complex chemical processes (Steefel et al. 2015). In the meantime, improved algorithms and computer power opened the way for larger simulations.