Berkeley Lab helped organize the recent Pacific Rim Forum on the Earthquake Resilience of Nuclear Facilities—the overarching objective of which was to share lessons for enhancing the earthquake resilience of nuclear facilities.
Berkeley Lab, U.C. Davis, and the U.N. Reno will collaborate to develop advanced computational tools for modeling and simulating the earthquake response of nuclear facilities, including the effects of soil-structure-interaction.
ESD’s Boris Faybishenko recently received word that Groundwater Vulnerability: The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, for which he was a writer and lead editor, has been published and distributed worldwide by Wiley.
National Lab Day, explaining the role of U.S. National Labs to Congress, was held on September 16 in Washington. ESD contributed to a strong Berkeley Lab presence at this event, particularly with respect to climate and environmental issues.
Daisuke Asahina led development of a modeling approach for studying hydromechanical coupled processes within geological formations. Model simulations showed good agreement with two independent studies of hydromechanical coupling.
ESD’s Phil Long and UC Berkeley professor Kai Vetter both offered reassuring words to those who are worried about local beaches accruing radioactive material as a result of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
LBNL and JAEA reached an agreement to collaborate on developing “a methodology to evaluate the impact of geological disposal on the living environment (surface environment) and environmental safety science”
Jens Birkholzer has been named as the new ESD Division Deputy. As announced by ESD's Director Susan Hubbard, Jens will have an expanded role in developing a variety of subsurface energy related opportunities at Berkeley Lab.
Scientists have recently proposed a method by which nuclear waste could in the future be contained by injecting it into fracking boreholes. ESD hydrologist Jens Birkholzer comments on this possibility.
Using an analytical approach to study solute transport through a fracture in a permeable rock matrix, Jim Houseworth, Daisuke Asahina, and Jens Birkholzer generated a closed-form model that accounts for elusive fracture-matrix transport.