Earth science leader at Livermore Lab dead at 54

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Dec 2, 2006 | by Ian Hoffman

Gudmundur Svavar "Bo" Bodvarsson, a versatile athlete and Berkeley hydrogeologist who led efforts to ensure a Nevada desert mountain could safely store the most radioactive nuclear wastes for tens of thousands of years, died Wednesday. He was 54.

Bodvarsson, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 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.

Bodvarsson and his researchers wired Yucca Mountain with sensors and recreated it, down more than 1,000 feet below the surface, as a model inside Berkeley computers. The instruments fed the model and were sensitive enough to pick up a desert rain cloud passing overhead.

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 of nuclear reactors nationwide.

Bodvarsson also was a towering figure in Bay Area amateur sports, a relentless competitor in two-man beach volleyball and a powerful scorer in more than 20 years of senior league soccer.

"He's just a tremendous natural athlete," said Marvin Vinik, coach of the Berkeley Fog, a top-division team for over-30 players in the East Bay. "Whatever sport he touched he was just fabulous."

Bodvarsson never showed for a game two weeks ago. At the same time, he told colleagues at the Earth Sciences Division that he led at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that he was going on vacation.

Instead, Bodvarsson checked into Kaiser Permanente Hospital Oakland, complaining of problems breathing and stomach pains. His health and appetite seemed to improve, and lab co-workers came to visit. Hospital officials informed them on arrival that Bodvarsson had died, one day before he said he was to be released. The cause of death had not been determined Friday.

Bodvarsson grew up in a tiny Icelandic village, Ljosafoss, and was valedictorian of a school built on his grandfather's land. After graduation, the

6-foot-3-inch Bodvarsson played on Iceland's national volleyball and basketball teams. He landed in Salisbury, N.C., on a full scholarship to Catawba College, where he collected degrees in physics and mathematics. He met a girl from Charlotte named Mary and made her his wife. After studying civil engineering at N.C. State, Bodvarsson and his wife and son came to UC Berkeley for his doctorate in hydrogeology.

"It was just obvious this was a gifted young man who could take any course and do very well," said his Ph.D. adviser, Paul Witherspoon.

The young Icelander plunged himself into learning about hot geothermal pockets miles deep and how to turn steam into electricity. Figuring out the mysteries of the deep Earth from a few, well-placed borings helped get him a job in 1980 among Lawrence Berkeley lab's Earth scientists.

At Berkeley, "he was simply a born leader," Witherspoon said. "He had the ability to recognize what the key problems were to be broken down into key questions so groups could be organized around answering these questions by such and such date," Witherspoon said.

Co-workers found Bodvarsson got a lot out of them gently, and his deputy Ernie Majer said Bodvarsson fought harder than any manager for his people.

Mary Pratt, Bodvarsson's former wife, said her husband channeled his stress from work into sports. Bodvarsson played for a semi-pro soccer team, The Swedes, in San Francisco and for years terrorized Bay Area beaches in four- and two-man volleyball games.A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St., in Berkeley.