Modeling of transport in groundwater for environmental risk assessment

This paper presents the principles underlying a recently developed numerical technique for modeling transport in heterogeneous porous media. The method is then applied to derive the concentration mean and variance, the concentration CDF, exceedance probabilities and exposure time CDF, which are required by various regulatory agencies for risk and performance assessment calculations. The dependence of the various statistics on elapsed travel time, location in space, the dimension of the detection volume, natural variability and pore-scale dispersion is investigated and discussed.