Monte Carlo simulation of contaminant release from a radioactive waste deposit

This paper addresses the problem of radionuclides transport through the artificial porous matrices constituting the engineered barriers of a permanent deposit for radioactive wastes under design by the Italian Agency for Energy and Environment (ENEA). The complexity of the phenomena involved, augmented by the heterogeneity and stochasticity of the media in which transport occurs, renders the classical analytical-numerical approaches scarcely adequate for a close-to-reality modeling. Hence, we propound the use of a Monte Carlo simulation method based on the Kolmogorov and Dmitriev theory of branching stochastic processes.