Paleoclimatic data applications: Long-term performance of uranium mill tailings repositories
- Environmental Sciences Lab., Grand Junction, CO (United States)
- Washington State Univ., Richland, WA (United States)
Abandoned uranium mill tailings sites in the Four Corners region are a lasting legacy of the Cold War. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is designing landfill repositories that will isolate hazardous constituents of tailings from biological intrusion, erosion, and the underlying aquifer for up to 1,000 years. With evidence of relatively rapid past climate change, and model predictions of global climatic variation exceeding the historical record, DOE recognizes a need to incorporate possible ranges of future climatic and ecological change in the repository design process. In the Four Corners region, the center of uranium mining and milling activities in the United States, proxy paleoclimatic records may be useful not only as a window on the past, but also as analogs of possible local responses to future global change. We reconstructed past climate change using available proxy data from tree rings, packrat middens, lake sediment pollen, and archaeological records. Interpretation of proxy paleoclimatic records was based on present-day relationships between plant distribution, precipitation, and temperature along a generalized elevational gradient for the region. For the Monticello, Utah, uranium mill tailings site, this first approximation yielded mean annual temperature and precipitation ranges of 2 to 10{degrees} C, and 38 to 80 cm, respectively, corresponding to late glacial and Altithermal periods. These data are considered to be reasonable ranges of future climatic conditions that can be input to evaluations of groundwater recharge, radon-gas escape, erosion, frost penetration, and biointrusion in engineered earthen barriers designed to isolate tailings.
- Research Organization:
- Rust Geotech, Inc., Grand Junction, CO (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 198222
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9409325-; ON: DE96003275; TRN: 96:001174-0013
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Workshop on climate change in the four corners and adjacent regions: implications for environmental restoration and land-use planning, Grand Junction, CO (United States), 12-14 Sep 1994; Other Information: PBD: Sep 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of Climate change in the four corners and adjacent regions: Implications for environmental restoration and land-use planning; Waugh, W.J. [ed.]; PB: 199 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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