A New Initiative for Developing Advanced Simulation Capabilities for Environmental Management (ASCEM) - 10470

The United States Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Environmental Management (EM), in collaboration with other DOE offices, is leading a multi-institution, multidisciplinary team of geoscientists, material scientists, and computational scientists from Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, and Savannah River National Laboratories to launch a new modeling initiative for Advanced Simulation Capability for Environmental Management (ASCEM). ASCEM is a-state-of-the-art scientific tool and approach for understanding and predicting contaminant fate and transport in natural and engineered systems. This modular and open source high performance computing tool will facilitate integrated approaches to modeling and site characterization that enable robust and standardized assessments of performance and risk for EM cleanup and closure activities. The ASCEM program is aimed at addressing critical EM program needs to better understand and quantify the subsurface flow and contaminant transport behavior in complex geological systems and the long-term performance of engineered components including cementitous materials in nuclear waste disposal facilities, in order to reduce uncertainties and risks associated with DOE EM’s environmental cleanup and closure programs. Building upon national capabilities developed from decades of R&D in subsurface geosciences, modeling and simulation, and environmental remediation, the ASCEM initiative will develop an integrated, highperformance, open-source computer modeling system for multiphase, multicomponent, multiscale subsurface flow and contaminant transport. In addition, the integrated model will incorporate capabilities for predicting releases from various waste forms, identifying exposure pathways and performing dose calculations, and conducting systematic uncertainty quantification. The model will be demonstrated on selected sites and then applied to support the next generation of performance assessments of nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning facilities across the EM complex.