Groundwater/porewater hydrochemistry at Horonobe URL: Data Freeze I; Preliminary data quality evaluation for boreholes HDB-9, 10 and 11

Kunimaru, Takanori; Ota, Kunio ; Alexander, W. R.*; Yamamoto, Hajime*

A quality management system (QMS) will save on effort by reducing errors and the requirement to re-sample and re-analysis and eventually lead to ensuring the reliability of the investigation results. In the Horonobe Underground Research Laboratory project, work has been ongoing to develop an appropriate QMS which is applicable to surface-based investigations. A quality assurance (QA) audit of hydrochemical datasets for boreholes HDB-9 - 11 has been carried out by applying both the groundwater QA methodology employed in the recent site assessments in Sweden and the porewater QA regime newly proposed for assigning the QA categories. This QA audit exercise indicates that the HDB-9 - 11 hydrochemical data are classified into lower categories because mainly of contamination of waters by drilling fluids, poor time-series data coverage and oxidation of core materials and also clarifies areas where additional information/work would be required to the ongoing programme.