Determination of water movement in the unsaturated zone at Yucca Mountain using chloride, bromide, and chlorine isotopes as environmental tracers. Final report

This report, prepared by Hydro Geo Chem staff for Los Alamos National Laboratory, summarizes work conducted by the company under Subcontract 9-XG1-N3993-1. The ultimate objective of this work is to characterize the movement of subsurface water in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Data produced under this contract is to be used by the US Department of Energy in its Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Project (YMP) to help determine hydrologic flows that may affect the performance of a potential nuclear waste repository. The data may be used in the licensing proceedings, and certain quality assurance procedures have thus been required. The work has focussed on measuring the distribution of environmental tracers-chlorine-36, chlorine, and bromine-and on evaluating the depth to which these conservative solutes have percolated in the unsaturated zone at Yucca Mountain. The following discussion summarizes progress made on the tasks outlined in the original Scope of Work. Details of this work and all data acquired by Hydro Geo Chem for this subcontract have been systematically organized in logbooks and laboratory notebooks. These documents have been structured to make it easy to trace the analytical history of a sample, from time of receipt to the final analytical results