Yucca Mountain Research Assignment

Yucca Mountain Research
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Yucca Mountain Research
The Yucca Mountain, Nevada, has been under examination as a possible nuclear waste repository since Congress first selected it in 1987 (Rechard, Liu, Tsang, & Finsterle, 2014). The mountain has several layers of silicic volcanic tuff which were deposited as a result of ash falls following the eruption of calderas, which have since become extinct (Swift & Bonano, 2016). The layers alternate between welded tuff, formed as a result of compression of deposited ash at high temperatures, and non-welded tuff, formed as a result of compression of ash under low temperatures. Yucca Mountain is composed of a deep water table located approximately 200m below the disposal section and 600m below Yucca Mountain crest (Swift & Bonano, 2016). The groundwater in Yucca Mountain is located in the fractures and in the rock matrix, where the water flux occurs at 90% and 10% respectively. The flow of groundwater within the welded tuffs is in sub-vertical fractures, and as the depths increases, the flow moves towards the largest faults. To the west of Yucca Mountain is the Solitario Canyon fault. According to Rasmussen and Keith (2015), there is a Walker Zone fault to the north and a Stateline –Pahrump Fault to the south of Yucca Mountain. Connecting these two faults is a dilatant jog in which most of the calderas are located. Within the Yucca mountain is also a swarm fault, which moves from the north to the south, forming a normal fault (Rasmussen & Keith, 2015). A low-angle thrust fault exists towards the tilt in the Bullfrog Hills. Most of the faults within Yucca Mountain are either thrust or normal faults.
The Yucca Mountain is located in an arid environment which, conceptually, made it a viable site for isolation of nuclear waste. According to Alley and Alley (2013), Yucca Mountain basin is hydrologically closed, and as such, water from the surface of from underground cannot flow out of the area within the mountain. This was an important consideration in the selection of a nuclear repository site because water is one of the possible ways of getting radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Further, since the water table is 600m below the crest (Swift & Bonano, 2016), scientist believed that it was possible to create a repository that was 300m below the land surface. This would still leave approximately 300m untouched, thus preventing any disruption of the water table (Alley & Alley, 2013). Being in an arid area, Yucca Mountain was geologically conducive for the creation of a repository site because even during rainfall, very little water would reach the repository. This is because a lot of the water would be trapped around the openings of the unsaturated zone, which was seen as more viable than the saturated zones (Alley & Alley, 2013). Therefore, the possibility of water coming into contact with nuclear waste had been substantially addressed.
Additionally, rocks under the proposed repository site are said to c...