Contaminant leakage from deeply buried cylindrical repositories

The presence of any leak in a waste repository is going to cause some concern since it may lead to the contamination of the surrounding soil and groundwater. This is an important problem which occurs and recurs, sometimes despite the precautions taken to minimize the possibility of development of any leak. The effects of contaminant leakage in general are not well understood. Thus it is the aim in this paper to develop some semi‐analytical solutions of leakage problems occurring in deeply buried cylindrical repositories. In the solution approach, a series of integral transforms is used to simplify the governing equations and solutions are found in the transform space before numerical inversions are applied to obtain the contaminant concentrations in real space and time. To illustrate the application of the technique, results of some leakage cases are presented.