Not only are the majority of DOE's difficult cleanup issues related to subsurface contamination, but the proposed final resting place for most stabilized waste will be in subsurface repositories or disposal areas. Increasing our understanding of the subsurface processes is a critical part of this cleanup effort.

INEEL's Subsurface Science Initiative, led by the Environmental and Energy Science division, is a coordinated, multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaborative research program. The ultimate goal of the SSI is to develop and validate reliable predictive models, design robust containment systems and devise reliable, durable monitoring systems. The Initiative focuses not only wide-reaching research campaigns, but also on building the technical and experimental infrastructure--such as the planned Subsurface Geosciences Laboratory--needed to advance subsurface science.

A major research challenge is to bridge the gap from laboratory-scale to field-scale mastery of coupled subsurface processes--to understand the combined interactions of chemical, biological, and physical reactions both temporally and spatially. The INEEL’s Subsurface Science Initiative will use field observations to develop mesoscale laboratory-testable hypotheses, with experiments conducted at a scale at which processes couple correctly. Once these hypotheses are understood from mesoscale experiments, field-scale experiments will then be used to confirm or reject the hypotheses.