Boreholes and wells in the 300 Area

Naming

One of the potentially confusing issues for outside users is the installation and naming of wells and boreholes at Hanford, and how to find information on existing wells and boreholes. A detailed description of this can be found in chapter 4 of the 2008 annual Hanford groundwater monitoring report. Even if one does not read this, it is important to realize that there are two parallel naming schemes, and that each well has thus two unique names.

The first is the so called well ID. This is 5 characters (such as C5000 or A5016). The first character is a letter, and the 2nd through 5th characters are numbers. This well id is assigned centrally whenever anyone wants to drill a well or an aquifer tube. The second name is a more descriptive name which generally indicates where a well is located. This is something like 399-1-1 or 399-4-13. All wells in the IFRC array, and virtually all wells in the database have a 399 prefix - the only exception being aquifer tubes, which generally have an AT prefix (e.g. AT-3-2-M).

Each of these names are unique, and the two names are used interchangeably by many users. In many cases, reports will give both names, with one of them between parentheses. In other cases only one name may be given. It should be noted that apart from the prefix (which indicates location), little information can be derived from the remainder of the numbers. It should also be noted that there are some wells which have an additional letter (A, B) such as 399-1-10A. In the  datapackages a full list of the boreholes in the 300 Area with both the well ID and the name is provided. In addition, the 300 Area IFRC map gives both the wellID and the borehole name allowing easy location of specific wells.

Wells vs boreholes

There is a difference between boreholes (which are really holes in the ground) and wells (which have completions). In most cases, this difference is ignored, and thus the name of the borehole becomes the name of the completed well. However, at the database level there is a possibility to have different well completions for one borehole (which is for instance relevant for the IFRC array), and which allows for attaching sample points to the same borehole but different completions.