Ijiri Yuji, Saegusa Hiromitsu, Sawada Atsushi, Ono Makoto, Watanabe Kunio, Karasaki Kenzi, Doughty Christine, Shimo Michito, Fumimura Kenichi
Taisei Corporation, Nuclear Facilities Division, 1-25-1 Nishi Shinjyuku, Shinjyuku-ku, Tokyo 163-0606, Japan.
J Contam Hydrol. 2009 Jan 26;103(3-4):168-81. doi: 10.1016/j.jconhyd.2008.10.010. Epub 2008 Nov 6.
Qualitative evaluation of the effects of uncertainties originating from scenario development, modeling approaches, and parameter values is an important subject in the area of safety assessment for high-level nuclear waste disposal sites. In this study, regional-scale groundwater flow analyses for the Tono area, Japan were conducted using three continuous models designed to handle heterogeneous porous media. We evaluated the simulation results to quantitatively analyze uncertainties originating from modeling approaches. We found that porous media heterogeneity is the main factor which causes uncertainties. We also found that uncertainties originating from modeling approaches greatly depend on the types of hydrological structures and heterogeneity of hydraulic conductivity values in the domain assigned by modelers. Uncertainties originating from modeling approaches decrease as the amount of labor and time spent increase, and iterations between investigation and analyses increases.
