Gudmundur S. (Bo) Bodvarsson - Career at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Career At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Bo Bodvarsson joined the Berkeley Lab staff in 1980 while he was still a graduate research assistant at UC-Berkeley. Prior to that, he’d worked as a research engineer at the Icelandic Building Research Institute. The young Icelander plunged himself into learning about hot geothermal pockets miles deep and how to turn their steam into electricity. Figuring out the mysteries of the deep Earth from a few, well-placed borings helped get him a job among Lawrence Berkeley lab's top earth scientists.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California (www.lbl.gov).

Said Paul Witherspoon, a retired scientist who brought Bodvarsson to Berkeley Lab and was his mentor, “Bo was a gifted individual and one of the hardest working graduate students I ever had at Berkeley. He carried this approach with him in pursuing his career at the Lab and developed into a disciplined scientist. No problem in his field was too tough to handle. The growth and success of ESD stands as a tribute to his remarkable abilities.”

He worked on geothermal research until the mid-1980s, when he began research on nuclear waste storage. Bo Bodvarsson led a team tapped to investigate the movement of water inside Yucca Mountain and figure out whether its mammoth volumes of volcanic ash could lock up casks of spent nuclear fuel indefinitely.

Said Ernest Majer, a long-time Berkeley Lab colleague and deputy director of the Earth Sciences Division, “Having known Bo for nearly 30 years I am deeply saddened by his passing and aware of the tremendous loss at a professional as well personal level. There was not a person I know who was a stronger advocate for his people and who fought harder for what he believed. He almost single-handedly elevated the quality of the science and work within the Earth Sciences Division. His vitality, insight and personality will be sorely missed.” As a scientist, Bodvarsson made his mark by leading the development of a 3-D site-scale model of Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the proposed site of a permanent underground repository for high-level radioactive waste. This model was used to characterize hydrogeologic conditions inside the mountain under a wide range of different scenarios.

Bodvarsson and his research group also helped develop a hydrological model of Yucca Mountain that worked on a much finer scale than the original site model. Building on his knowledge of geothermal formations, he contributed to detailed investigations of the site's underground hydrology. He had his greatest impact leading the development of 3-D scale models of seepage patterns inside the mountain under a wide range of scenarios.

The models were designed to help pinpoint where seepage might pose a risk of corroding waste containers, which the United States Department of Energy proposes placing in tunnels in thick volcanic rock more than 1,200 feet under the surface and above the water table. This set of hydrological models is used to accurately calculate seepage into waste emplacement tunnels under various hydrogeologic and climatic conditions.

Co-workers said they enjoyed working with him because he was always lighthearted. “Even during very serious project negotiations, he really had his own way of being witty,” said deputy program head Yvonne Tsang.

Based on physical evidence and results from their models, Bo Bodvarsson persuaded himself that Yucca Mountain was as dry and as good as anyone could hope for in an underground nuclear dump.

Critics and the state of Nevada say the mountain is unsuitable, and it has not been licensed to receive the waste piling up at 104 nuclear reactors nationwide.

Said long-time Berkeley Lab colleague, Sally Benson, “Bo was an outstanding leader of the Yucca Mountain Project. His passion, drive and scientific leadership made his team of hydrologists, geochemists and geophysicists star performers. That had to be one of the most challenging earth sciences problems to work on in the world, and no one did it better than Bo and the team he led.”

"He was really dynamic; he was larger than life," said Peter Persoff, a scientist who worked with Mr. Bodvarsson from 2000 to 2005. "Not your stereotypical scientist cloistered in the lab. Not a geek, not a nerd -- just the opposite."