PROGRAM CODE GERA

Code Information Page

The GeRa code (Geomigration of Radionuclides) is a high-tech software package for a three-dimensional hydrogeological modeling of groundwater flow and mass transport of pollutants, developed by Nuclear Safety Institute (IBRAE) (www.ibrae.ac.ru) and Marchuk Institute of Numerical Mathematics (INM RAS) (www.inm.ras.ru). The State customer and the coordinator is the state atomic energy Corporation Rosatom.

There are currently 3 versions of the GeRa code:

• GeRa/V1, sertified by the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostekhnadzor) in 2018,
• GeRa/V2, sertified by Rostekhnadzor in 2021,
• GeRa/V3, which is currently under active development and has advanced modeling capabilities.

Nowaday, GeRa/V1 and GeRa/V2 versions have been certified by Rostekhnadzor for practical use in substantiating the safety assessment of nuclear facilities, transferred under license agreements to a number of organizations and are actively used to create hydrogeological models and assess the safety of various nuclear facilities.

Training courses are held annually as part of the School-Seminar on New Generation Codes.

GeRa provides a full cycle of hydrogeological modeling: the construction of a geological model and its parameterization, creating and filling of a monitoring data base, computational grid generating, groundwater flow and mass transport calculations, visualization and verification of modeling results.

Main capabilities of the GeRa code

• Intuitive and easy-to-learn graphical interface for the whole simulation and verification cycle.
• Geological model creation with the ability to download data, prepared in the other programs.
• Usage geostatistics and interpolation methods for geological layers construction.
• Calculation on unstructured locally refining computational grids, using one of two generators.
• Simulation of a large number of different physical processes, such as groundwater flow in confined-unconfined and saturated-unsaturated conditions, advective-diffusion-dispersive mass transport, density convection and many others (a list of all processes is provided on the page "Code Features").
• Chemical reactions accounting, as well as the calculation of radioactive decay, with accounting decay chains.
• Using high-parallel systems for calculations performing.
• Embedded possibilities for visualization of calculation results, its analysis and verification of models on real field data.
• Mesh-independent setting of model parameters.

Experience of the using GeRa code

With the using GeRa code, models of the following facilities were implemented: designed near surface disposal facility (Federal State Unitary Enterprise "Mayak Production Association" and Ural Electromechanical Plant); designed deep geological disposal (in Sosnovy Bor and Siberian Chemical Combine); LRW injection sites "Zheleznogorsk" and "Dimitrovgrad" of branch of FSUE "National Operator for Radioactive Waste Management"; designed underground research laboratory in the Nizhnekansk rock massif (URL NKM); storage facilities for special radioactive waste (FSUE "Radon"); sludge storages and gaspipes (Angarsk Electrolysis Chemical Complex); slurry storage facilities (Siberian Chemical Combine and Chepetsk Mechanical Plant); spent fuel pools (Beloyarsk NPP); sites of Russian Research Institute for Chemical Technology and V. G. Khlopin Radium Institute as part of the decommissioning works; landfills in Nekrasovka and Kuchino.

COPYRIGHT HOLDER

The Russian Federation, on behalf of which Rosatom State Corporation acts, and IBRAE RAS

DEVELOPERS

IBRAE RAS, INM RAS