Abstract
Recent drilling affords new opportunities to investigate the occurrence, distribution, and transport of radionuclides above and below the water table at the Nevada Test Site (NTS), Nye County, Nevada. This program is unique because of elevated levels of radioactivity encountered during drilling (>3.7E+6Bq/l3H), extreme completion depths (>950 m), and the expense of constructing new wells (>$1E+6/borehole). Sites of five nuclear tests have been drilled. Three of the events were fired in Yucca Flat which is a hydrologically closed basin and two were fired in fractured volcanics of Pahute Mesa. Results from Yucca Flat indicate that volatile and refractory radionuclides fractionated at zero time, are not highly mobile under saturated conditions. In contrast, boreholes completed on Pahute Mesa intercept high concentrations of tritium (>3.7E+6Bq/l3H) and other radionuclides transported more than 300 m from event cavities as dissolved species or as colloids.
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