Hydraulic and thermal properties of soil samples from the buried waste test facility

In shallow land burial, the most common disposal method for low-level waste, waste containers are placed in shallow trenches and covered with natural sediment material. To design such a facility requires an in-depth understanding of the infiltration and evaporation processes taking place at the soil surface and the effect these processes have on the amount of water cycling through a burial zone. At the DOE Hanford Site in Richland, Washington, a field installation called the Buried Waste Test Facility (BWTF) has been constructed to study unsaturated soil water and contaminant transport. PNL is collecting data at the BWTF to help explain soil water movement at shallow depths, and specifically evaporation from bare sols. The data presented here represent the initial phase of a cooperative effort between PNL and Washington State University to use data collected at the BWFT to study the evaporated process and how it relates to the design of shallow land burial grounds. The method of chthe fraction of a specific element leached can be determined al half-lives with experimental ones, over a range of 24 orders of magnitude was obtained. This is a strong argument that the alpha decay could be considered a fission process with very high mass asymmetry and charge density asymmetry