Room ceilings and walls at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant tend to collapse over time,
causing rubble piles on floors of empty rooms. The surrounding rock formation will gradually
compact these rubble piles until they eventually become solid salt, but the length of time for
a rubble pile to reach a certain porosity and permeability is unknown. This paper details the
initial model development to predict the porosity and fluid flow network of a closing empty
room. Conventional geomechanical numerical methods would struggle to model empty …