The concept of a disturbed zone surrounding the mined openings of a potential geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste was introduced by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as a region to be excluded for determining groundwater travel time to the accessible environment, but to be included for determining the impact of underground construction and radioactive decay heat on groundwater movement and radionuclide transport for total system performance analysis. This paper explores both the regulatory and technical necessity for characterizing and modeling a larger region -- the altered zone -- within which the temperature is increased significantly by heat from the high-level waste. Particular attention is given to addressing the effects of heterogeneity on groundwater flux and travel time, showing how these effects might be modeled simply on a macroscopic scale, and outlining its parameters. The effect of uncertainty in the parameter values on the performance of a potential repository can then be easily handled by probabilistic analysis.

The angular resolution of long-exposure images from ground-based telescopes equipped with laser guide star adaptive optics systems is fundamentally limited by the the accuracy with which the tip-tilt aberrations introduced by the atmosphere can be corrected. Assuming that a natural star is used as the tilt reference, the residual error due to tilt anisoplanatism can significantly degrade the long-exposure resolution even if the tilt reference star is separated from the object being imaged by a small angle. Given the observed distribution of stars in the sky, the need to find a tilt reference star quite close to the object restricts the fraction of the sky over which long-exposure images with diffraction limited resolution can be obtained. In this paper, the authors present a comprehensive performance analysis of tip-tilt compensation systems that use a natural star as a tilt reference, taking into account properties of the atmosphere and of the Galactic stellar populations, and optimizing over the system operating parameters to determine the fundamental limits to the long-exposure resolution. Their results show that for a ten meter telescope on Mauna Kea, if the image of the tilt reference star is uncorrected, about half the sky can be imaged in the V …