Determination of gas diffusion coefficients in saturated porous media: He and CH4 diffusion in Boom Clay

Abstract Boom Clay is presently studied as the reference host formation for the disposal of high-level and long-lived radioactive waste in Belgium. In a geological repository, the production of gas is unavoidable. Gas is produced by different mechanisms: anaerobic corrosion of metals in waste and packaging, radiolysis of water and organic materials in the packages and microbial degradation of various organic wastes. Corrosion and radiolysis yield mainly hydrogen while microbial degradation leads to methane and carbon dioxide. The generated gas will dissolve in the ground water. As transport in Boom Clay is dominated by diffusion, the dissolved gas is transported away from the repository by diffusion as dissolved species. If the rate of gas generation is larger than the diffusive flux into Boom Clay, the pore water within the disposal gallery will become oversaturated and a free gas phase might form. If the gas pressure keeps increasing, free gas ingress into Boom Clay will occur, most likely through creation of new pathways. In order to make a good evaluation of the balance between gas generation and gas dissipation through engineered barriers and host formation, good estimates for the gas diffusion coefficients of the gases are needed. The currently available gas diffusion parameters for hydrogen in Boom Clay suffer from a large uncertainty, and by application of conservative values for both the source term and the gas migration term the formation of a free gas phase can presently not be excluded for some waste types. In this study a versatile method was developed to determine more precisely the gas diffusion coefficient for dissolved gases in Boom Clay. For the development of the technique, He and CH4 were used. The proposed method is based on a through diffusion methodology and allows for two dissolved gases to diffuse through a clay sample at the same time. From the evolution of the diffusant concentration in both compartments, the apparent diffusion coefficients of dissolved He and CH4 were obtained: 12.2 × 10− 10 and 2.42 × 10− 10 m2/s, with uncertainties of 10%, respectively.