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Analytic solutions are employed to investigate potential groundwater transport of tritium from a radioactive tracer site near the Project Gnome site in southeastern New Mexico. The tracer test was conducted in 1963 and introduced significant quantities of radionuclides to the transmissive and laterally continuous Culebra dolomite. Groundwater in the Culebra near Gnome travels toward a regional discharge point at the Pecos River, a distance of about 10 to 15 km, depending on flow path. Groundwater transport of radionuclides from the Gnome site is therefore of interest due to the proximity of the accessible environment and the 31-year time period during which migration is likely to have occurred. The analytical stochastic solutions used incorporate the heterogeneity observed in the Culebra by treating transmissivity as a spatially correlated random field. The results indicate that significant spreading of tritium will occur in the Culebra dolomite as a result of the combination of relatively high transmissivity, high spatial variability, and high spatial correlation of transmissivity. Longitudinal spreading may cause a very small fraction of tritium mass to arrive at the Pecos River within the 31 years since the tracer test. However, dilution and transverse dispersion will act to distribute this mass over a very large volume, thereby reducing groundwater concentrations. Despite the high degree of spreading, the calculations indicate that most of the tritium remains near the source. At present, the center of mass is estimated to have moved approximately 260 m downgradient of the test location and about 95 percent of the mass is estimated to have remained within about 1 km downgradient.
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The US Department of Energy (DOE) and its predecessor agencies are responsible for nuclear weapons research and development as part of the national defense program. These activities include underground nuclear testing, and a small number of such tests have been conducted at sites distant from the Nevada Test Site (NTS). An NTS site-wide Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) is being prepared in 1995 and includes the two offsite test areas in Nevada: the Shoal site and the Central Nevada Test Area. At the time of these tests, evaluations of project safety and predictions of groundwater transport of contaminants were made, and the tests were deemed safe to the public. These early evaluations were not considered sufficient for the EIS, so DOE decided to perform a new exposure assessment for the Shoal site. The basic scenario evaluated for this exposure assessment is transport of tritium from the Shoal underground nuclear test by groundwater to a receptor well where an individual drinks the contaminated water for 70 years, centered around the time of peak tritium concentration. This scenario is entirely hypothetical because, as of 1995, there are no known occurrences of humans drinking water downgradient from the test. Four specific scenarios are analyzed because of uncertainty in flowpath direction. Two of these presume that wells are drilled at the boundary of the current DOE land withdrawal and are then used for drinking water supply. Wells do not currently exist at these locations and thus the resultant risks do not apply to any current populations; however, there are no controls to prevent such wells from being drilled in the future. The two other scenarios consider transport to the first existing wells along possible flowpaths. These wells are currently used only seasonally to water cattle, and as such, these risks also do not apply to current populations.