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Sustainable Systems
The production and testing of nuclear weapons has generated considerable subsurface legacy contamination — contamination that the DOE has the responsibility to locate, clean up, and monitor. Metals and radionuclide contaminants pose a particularly daunting challenge for DOE, because they do not degrade to benign products (or do so only through very slow radioactive decay).
Complicating the cleanup effort is the complexity of the subsurface system, where natural variability in hydrological, microbiologic, and geochemical properties exist over various length scales, which influence the distribution of contaminant plumes and their responses to remediation treatments.
Research within LBNL’s Sustainable Systems Science Focus Area is aimed at meeting some of the most difficult subsurface challenges that currently inhibit sustainable remediation and long term environmental stewardship. The Systems Framework used in this effort will consider the nature and interactions of key hydrological, microbiological, geochemical components as needed to connect the fundamental processes with their macroscopic manifestations. Three main challenges have been defined that will be tackeled within the Systems Framework. The research is expected to lead to scientific insights about complex system behavior that can be used to guide environmental stewardship.
Research in the Systainable Systems Scientific Focus Area is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research Division.