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Hydrology, Geochemistry, and Geology Group Los Alamos National Laboratory EES-6, MS-T003 Los Alamos, NM 87545
tseng{at}lanl.gov
Edited by DANIEL D. EVANS, THOMAS J. NICHOLSON, and TODD C. RASMUSSEN. Geophysical Monograph 42. American Geophysical Union, 2000 Florida Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20009. 2001. 196 p. $38.50 (AGU Member) $55.00 (Nonmember). ISBN 0-87590-983-3.
The subject of fluid flow in fractured rock has long been of considerable interest in the oil and gas industry for purposes of enhancing oil recovery and exploitation of geothermal reservoirs. Research in this area has gradually broadened to more comprehensive environmental problems involving flow and transport processes into and through fractured rock formations. More recently, a substantial research effort, known as the Yucca Mountain Project (YMP), has greatly promoted the development of a more systematic approach toward acquiring a better understanding and quantitative description of nonisothermal multi-phase flow and transport processes in variably saturated fractured rocks. Sponsored primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy over the last two decades, the YMP aims to obtain a detailed characterization of Yucca Mountain as a potential site for geologic isolation of high-level radioactive waste.
Major challenges of the Yucca Mountain Project are the presence of a multitude of strongly coupled nonlinear thermal, hydrological, chemical, and mechanical processes; the extremely complex geologic setting of Yucca Mountain; and the need to obtain reliable predictions of system performance over tens of thousands of years in the future. This broad agenda has brought together integrated research efforts across disciplinary boundaries to address the problem of safe disposal of nuclear waste in unsaturated fractured rock. Considerable progress in research over the years has now made the topic of flow and transport through unsaturated fractured rock a much more mature scientific discipline.
Originated by concerns and research needs relevant to high-level nuclear waste disposal in unsaturated fractured rock, the first edition of this book collected 22 full-length papers from a special symposium held during the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meetings in San Francisco in December 1986. That volume, published by AGU in 1987, covered a broad spectrum of the then state of knowledge within the area of "Flow and Transport through Unsaturated Fractured Rock". The current second edition, revised and published in 2001, includes five papers selected from the first edition, plus nine new contributions that reflect important recent developments in the unsaturated rock research arena. Of the five papers selected from the first edition, only one paper (i.e., "Flow and Transport Through Unsaturated Fractured Rock: An Overview") was succinctly updated with many recent references. The other four papers remain unchanged.
While many of the papers collected in the first edition still provide important concepts and fundamental processes of the physical system, I would have preferred to see only papers from the first edition that had been updated and revised. I did not quite understand the rationale for including papers that were not changed. As such, one obvious shortcoming of the second edition is the inclusion of a review paper that was written for the first edition more than a decade ago. Updating that review paper would certainly have been a worthwhile endeavor.
The 14 papers of the revised second edition are interdisciplinary in flavor. Topics covered include review material, laboratory and field studies, modeling and simulations, and discussions of basic concepts and critical physical processes of the system. These topics lean heavily toward the physical side of the spectrum, with little or no discussion of equally important chemical processes. Highlighting new insights and recent advances in hydrogeochemistry would have made the text much more appealing to a wide range of readers. The book could have benefitted also from some rearrangement of the different papers; this and adding subheadings in the table of contents section would have provided readers with a much easier to use reference work.
While by itself maybe a relatively minor point, the text also contains a few irritating typographic and factual errors. Among those, one concerns the References section of the otherwise very interesting paper "Multiscale Investigations of Liquid Flow in a Fractured Basalt Vadose Zone" by Faybishenko and colleagues. The paper of Su et al. cited in that paper was stated to be submitted to Water Resources Research in 1998. That paper actually appeared in Vol. 35(4):1019–1037, 1999. In addition, two very relevant publications referenced by Illman et al. were not listed in their own paper "Type-curve Analysis of Single- and Cross-Hole Tests" in this volume. Those two papers dealing with single-hole and cross-hole tests were published in Ground Water Vol. 38(6):899–911, 2000, and Water Resources Research Vol. 37(3):583–603, 2001, respectively.
In general, however, I very much liked the book, which should provide a very useful resource for advanced students and experts in the field of hydrogeology. The text may be especially appealing to scientists and researchers, and even regulators, already working in the fractured rock area who desire a survey of current accomplishments and future directions. Postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers should find this volume equally stimulating and informative.
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