Collection

Digitalisation of Geospheres for Environmental Protection

Submission status
Open
Open for submission from
01 December 2022
Submission deadline
31 December 2024

Data Science (Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence) became more than an important facilitator for many domains in fundamental and applied sciences as well as industry and is disrupting the way of research already to a large extent. Originally, data sciences were viewed to be well-suited, especially, for data-intensive applications such as image processing, pattern recognition, etc. In the recent past, particularly, data-driven and physics-inspired machine learning methods have been developed to an extent that they accelerate numerical simulations and became directly applied in the nuclear waste management cycle. In addition to process-based approaches for creating surrogate models, other disciplines such as virtual reality methods and high-performance computing are leveraging the potential of data sciences more and more. The present challenge is utilizing of the best experimental and monitoring data as well as model concepts and tools to integrate multi-chemical-physical, coupled processes, multi-scale and probabilistic simulations in Digital Twins (DT) able to mirror or predict the performance of its corresponding existing or future physical implementations including workflows.

Therefore, the main aim of the Topical Collection is to explore how the development of digitisation methods supports and influences our research concepts and practices in Environmental Earth Sciences. The Topical Collection invites different types of manuscripts, i.e. opinion, research, technical papers as well as reviews. We encourage contributions from related activities across a wide range of environmental geosciences.

The call for the Topical Collection was initiated from different actors, including research entities, technical support organizations and nuclear waste management organizations of the European projects EURAD (European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management) and PREDIS (Pre-disposal Management of Radioactive Waste).

Editors

  • Olaf Kolditz Olaf Kolditz , 

    Olaf Kolditz

    Olaf Kolditz is the head of the Department of Environmental Informatics at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ). He holds a Chair in Applied Environmental System Analysis at the Technische Universität in Dresden. His research interests are related to environmental fluid mechanics, numerical methods and software engineering with applications in geotechnics, hydrology and energy storage. Olaf Kolditz is the initiator of the OpenGeoSys project (www.opengeosys.org), an open source scientific software platform for the numerical simulation of thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical processes in porous media.

  • Diederik Jacques Diederik Jacques , 

    Diederik Jacques

    Diederik Jacques is head of the unit on Engineered and Geosystem Analysis at the Belgium Nuclear Research Centre. His research interests are in the fields of coupled reactive transport modelling in porous media and safety studies. He (co-)develops several tools for reactive transport modelling ranging from pore-scale to large-scale continuum models. The most important application domains are related to nuclear waste disposal with studies on engineered (cement-based) and natural systems and safety and performance studies for a surface repository, but are also in the field of environmental aspects in soil and aquifer systems.

  • Francis Claret Francis Claret , 

    Francis Claret

    Francis Claret is the deputy head of the Water, Environment, Process Development and Analysis Division at BRGM (the Geological Survey of France). His research focuses on the understanding of minerals/water/gas reactivity in the context of nuclear waste disposal by: (i) applying experimental techniques in a multiscale and multiphysics manner, and (ii) integrating this information in large scale modeling studies using most advanced reactive transport codes.

  • Erika Holt Erika Holt , 

    Erika Holt

    Erika Holt is the Customer Manager for Nuclear Energy at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. Earlier she has been a team leader of 30 experts within the radioactive waste management division, and currently serves as the project manager for the EU-wide project on pre-disposal radioactive waste management. She has over 20 years’ experience working on crystalline repository deposition concepts in Finland. Her research interests include initial state performance of engineered barrier systems, specifically with respect to concrete and clay material durability.

  • Réka Szőke Réka Szőke , 

    Réka Szőke

    Réka Szőke is Principal Scientist at Institute for Energy Technology in Norway and acting as Technical coordinator for Euratom HARPERS project Administrative Manager for the IAEA Collaborating Centre for Digitalis. She has more than 15 years’ experience with a strong background in material science and nuclear chemistry, working at the Centre for Energy Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the OECD Halden Reactor Project at the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) in Norway. Following the shutdown of IFE’s test reactors my focus shifted towards waste management and decommissioning.

  • David Garcia David Garcia , 

    David Garcia

    David Garcia is team leader at Amphos 21 Consulting SL (Spain His research experience includes geochemical modelling from the source-term (Radionuclide release, EBS, metals corrosion, secondary phase formation, etc.) to the near-field (radionuclide transport through the host-rock, modelling solubility and sorption processes, etc.). During the last 15 years, David has been actively participating in several European projects in both technical and management tasks, dealing in most cases with geochemical modelling of complex systems.

  • Vanessa Montoya Vanessa Montoya , 

    Vanessa Montoya

    Vanessa Montoya is research project leader with the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK-CEN). Her background is Chemistry with 15 years of professional and research experience in the following areas: Applied Geoscience, Radiochemistry, Modelling of coupled processes and safety analysis, Thermodynamics, Engineering, Geochemistry & Material Sciences, Radioactive waste management and repository research.

  • Sergey V. Churakov Sergey V. Churakov  &

    Sergey V. Churakov

    Sergey V. Churakov is Head of Laboratory of Waste Management in the Department of Nuclear Energy and Safety at the Paul Scherrer Institute and Full Professor in the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern. His research covers multidisciplinary topics of environmental geochemistry and mineralogy with specific focus on mechanistic understanding of transport and retention of hazardous contaminants and radionuclides in natural environment and geotechnical systems.

  • István Szőke István Szőke

    István Szőke

    István Szőke is Research Manager (head) of the Applied Physical Sciences department of the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) in Norway. István is also technical leader of the International Collaborating Centre on digitalisation for nuclear decommissioning at IFE designated by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Head of Research for the DECOM Cluster for Decommissioning and Repurposing, and funder of the DigiDecom workshop and training series.

Articles (2 in this collection)