Technical questions related to modeling groundwater flow and radionuclide transport in unsaturated, fractured rock

Group 4 has identified, discussed, and ranked the priority for further study of technical issues in the modeling research area. After listing 42 issues from the members, the group collectively discussed, combined, and casted the issues into 17 questions which were then ranked by voting. The top 10 issues identified by the group are reported in this summary. Justification and possible approaches to study each issue were briefly addressed by the members before these technical questions were presented to the whole workshop. For each issue, the mean value and the standard deviation (as a measure of consensus) for the ranking votes are enclosed in parentheses following the title.Issues include: fracture-matrix interaction;boundary and initial conditions; unsaturated and fracture parameters; formation heterogeneity; numerical experiments; model complexity vs data availability; computational efficiency; couple processes; continuum mechanics and Darcy`s law; coupled testing.