Uncertainty and variability of infiltration at Yucca Mountain: Part 2. Model results and corroboration

Abstract

[2] The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission actively investigated climate and infiltration at Yucca Mountain for two decades to (i) understand important controls and uncertainties influencing percolation through the unsaturated zone on multimillennial time scales and (ii) provide flux boundary conditions for up to 1 million years in performance assessment models of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. This second part of a two-part series describes site-scale model results for present and potential future conditions and confirmatory analyses for present-day conditions. At both the grid-cell and site-average scale, the calculated uncertainty distribution for net infiltration is approximately lognormal, and the coefficient of variation decreases with increasing net infiltration. Smaller relative but larger absolute responses to climate change occur where net infiltration is large. Comparisons of distributed model estimates with temperature and geochemical observations from the unsaturated zone suggest that average estimates are generally consistent but exhibit significant variability. An observed seepage event in the South Ramp of the Exploratory Studies Facility, combined with related subsurface observations across the site, suggests that subsurface spreading from zones of high infiltration to zones of low infiltration may occur in stratabound fractures, laterally extensive discontinuities, or at transitions between welded and nonwelded tuff units. Two conceptual models for unsaturated-zone flow each explain the subsurface observations, collectively providing bounding estimates for net infiltration. Model-predicted uncertainty distribution for decadal-average site-scale net infiltration is generally consistent with estimated percolation fluxes using the bounding hypotheses, suggesting that the model-calculated uncertainty is reasonably consistent with the uncertainty in interpreting site observations.