News

Sustainable Systems Scientific Focus Area
Established in the Earth Sciences Division

The production and testing of nuclear weapons has created a vast volume of subsurface legacy contamination that the DOE has the responsibility to locate, clean up, and monitor. Metals and many radionuclide contaminants pose a particularly daunting challenge for DOE, as they do not degrade to benign products (or do so only through very slow radioactive decay). Complicating the clean-up effort is the complexity of the subsurface system, where natural variability in hydrological, microbiological, and geochemical properties that exist over various length scales influence the distribution and reactivity of contaminant plumes.

The Earth Sciences Division of LBNL has recently been awarded a $24.5 Million, 5-year award from DOE Biological and Environmental Research (BER) to develop a Sustainable Systems Science Focus Area aimed at tackling complex subsurface challenges that currently inhibit sustainable remediation and long-term stewardship of metals and radionuclides across the DOE complex. The Systems Approach will consider the nature and interactions of key hydrological, microbiological, and geochemical components as needed to connect the fundamental processes with their macroscopic manifestations. The research is expected to lead to scientific insights about complex system behavior that can be used to guide environmental remediation and stewardship. The Systems Approach will be tested at DOE sites that have some of the largest projected cleanup costs, such as the Hanford Site ($50 B) and Savannah River Site ($30 B). The research will be carried out by a multi-disciplinary team of investigators in the Earth Sciences Division who have expertise in approaches that span from molecular to field scales, including: biomolecular, synchrotron, isotopic, geophysical, and reactive transport modeling.