Abstract: According to the UN, in 2008, for the first time, more people live in cities than in rural areas. An estimated 1 billion of these urban dwellers currently live in shanty-towns.  By 2030 more than 60% of global population will be urban, with more than 2 Billion slum dwellers.  The global trend toward urbanization concentrates millions into dense megacities.

More than half of the 25 current largest megacities globally are subject to significant earthquake hazards; a similar number are situated on river floodplains and are subject to frequent flooding. Add in the changes expected from climate change — increasing frequency and severity of weather-related events from droughts to storms to heat waves, as well as rising sea levels — and you get a recipe for disaster, especially given that 10% of the global population, and one out of every eight urban dwellers, lives in coastal areas with elevations below 10 meters above sea level. The problem is intensified by the fact that many of the world’s largest cities are hot spots of extreme poverty, where millions of people live in informal and substandard housing. 

Natural hazards become disasters when they interact with humans and our built environment.  Risk is the convolution of the inherent hazard acting on the “exposure” (people, buildings, ecosystems), through their respective vulnerabilities.  Many new urban dwellers, particularly in developing countries, are settling in high-hazard zones, frequently on previously “unbuildable land” (e.g., steep slopes surrounding major urban centers, or filled-in swamps). Seismic risk, being the product of exposure and vulnerability, is thus increasing exponentially, because of the rapid proliferation of substandard and self-built construction, particularly housing for new urban residents.

Recent large earthquakes and other disasters have illustrated the extent of the destruction that extreme geohazards can inflict on a modern, interconnected society, particularly through cascading effects and chains of failure.

The talk will examine the nature of natural hazard risk, how scientists quantify seismic risk, the impact of future catastrophes, and will conclude with some risk reduction options.

About the Speaker: Mary Lou Zoback is a seismologist and Consulting Professor in the Geophysics Department at Stanford University. From 2006-2011 she was Vice President for Earthquake Risk Applications with Risk Management Solutions, a private catastrophe modeling firm serving the insurance industry. In that role she utilized the company’s commercial risk models to explore the societal role of earthquake insurance, and to quantify the costs and benefits of disaster management and risk reduction activities.

Zoback previously was a senior research scientist at the USGS in Menlo Park, CA where she served as Chief Scientist of the Western Earthquake Hazards team. Her research interests include the relationship between active faulting, deformation and state of stress in the earth’s crust, quantifying earthquake likelihood, and characterizing natural hazard risk.

Dr. Zoback has served on numerous national committees and panels on topics ranging from increasing the Nation’s resilience to disasters, defining the next generation of Earth observations from space, storage of high-level radioactive waste, facilitating interdisciplinary research, and science education. From 1997-2000 she was a member of the National Research Council’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management. In 2012 she was appointed to the U. S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Obama.

In 1995 she was elected a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the American Geophysical Union, the Seismological Society of American, and is a past President of the Geological Society of America. Zoback is also past chair of the Advisory Committee for San Francisco’s Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety (CAPSS) program. She is currently a member of the National Academies' Resilient America Roundtable and the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems.

Abstract: The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted for much of the second half of the 20th Century. While the superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, a nuclear arms race became the centerpiece of a doctrine of mutually assured destruction, and prompted a mass production of plutonium, and the designing, building, and testing of large numbers of nuclear weapons. In more than 50 years of operation, the Cold War battlefields created over 100 metric tons of plutonium, produced tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, oversaw more than 1000 detonations, and left behind a legacy of contaminated facilities, soils, and ground water.  

The extent of long-term adverse health effects will depend on the mobility of plutonium and other actinides in the environment and on our ability to develop cost-effective scientific methods of removing or isolating actinides from the environment. Studying the complex chemistry of plutonium and the actinides in the environment is one of the most important technological challenges, and one of the greatest scientific challenges in actinide science today.

I will summarize our current understanding of actinide chemistry in the environment, and how that understanding was used in the decontamination and decommissioning of the Rocky Flats Site, where plutonium triggers for U.S. nuclear weapons were manufactured. At Rocky Flats, synchrotron radiation measurements made at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory were developed into a science-­based decision-­making tool that saved billions of dollars by focusing Site-­directed efforts in the correct  areas, and aided the most extensive cleanup in the history of Superfund legislation to finish one year ahead of schedule, ultimately resulting in billions of dollars in taxpayer savings.

About the Speaker: David L. Clark received a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1986 from Indiana University. His thesis work received the American Chemical Society’s Nobel Laureate Signature Award for the best chemistry Ph.D. thesis in the United States. Clark was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. He became a Technical Staff Member in the Isotope and Nuclear Chemistry Division in 1989. Since then he has held various leadership positions at the Laboratory, including program management for nuclear weapons and Office of Science programs, and Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science between 1997-2009. He has served the DOE as a technical advisor for environmental stewardship including the Rocky Flats cleanup and closure (1995-2005), closure of High Level Waste tanks at the Savannah River Site (2011), and as a technical advisor to the DOE High Level Waste Corporate Board (2009-2011). He is currently the Program Director for the National Security Education Center at Los Alamos, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Laboratory Fellow, and Leader of the Plutonium Science and Research Strategy for Los Alamos. His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to actinide science, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, and in the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials. He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of plutonium, and has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters.