Colloid-Facilitated Plutonium Transport in Fractured Tuffaceous Rock

Colloids have the potential to enhance the mobility of strongly sorbing radionuclide contaminants in groundwater at underground nuclear test sites. This study presents an experimental and numerical investigation of colloid-facilitated plutonium transport in fractured porous media to identify plutonium reactive transport processes. The transport parameters for dispersion, diffusion, sorption, and filtration are estimated with inverse modeling by minimizing the least-squares objective function of multicomponent concentration data from multiple transport experiments with the shuffled complex evolution metropolis algorithm. Capitalizing on an unplanned experimental artifact that led to colloid formation, we adopt a stepwise strategy to first interpret the data from each experiment separately and then to incorporate multiple experiments simultaneously to identify a suite of plutonium-colloid transport processes. Nonequilibrium or kinetic attachment and detachment of plutonium-colloid in fractures were clearly demonstrated and captured in the inverted modeling parameters along with estimates of the source plutonium fraction that formed plutonium-colloids. The results from this study provide valuable insights for understanding the transport mechanisms and environmental impacts of plutonium in groundwater aquifers.