Jerzy Szymanski

Jerzy S. Szymanski, Geologist with a Storied Life 

Jerzy Szymanski of Denver, Colorado, passed away peacefully at the retirement facility of Harvard Square on July 18, 2024. 

 He was born in 1943 in Vilnius, Lithuania which at the time was a Polish city occupied by the German army. By the end of the Second World War, Jerzy was left an orphan after his Polish father was imprisoned as a political dissident in Siberia and his American mother returned to the United States. Jerzy was raised in the town of Płock, Poland, by his maternal grandmother and later spent time in Łodz, Poland. It was in central Poland that Jerzy gained a deep appreciation for mountain landscapes and their natural history. He received a master’s degree from the University of Warsaw in engineering geology and hydrogeology and continued doctoral studies until the 1968 political upheavals in Poland led to his emigration to the United States along with his first wife, Tamara Goldstein, and six-month old son, Robert M. Szymanski.

 As a political refugee in the United States, Jerzy worked as a design engineer for Charles T. Main Inc. and later for Stone and Webster Inc. In 1972, he took a project geologist position with the international California-based firm, Dames and Moore conducting assessments of geological hazards at domestic and international nuclear power plants, later attaining a promotion to senior geologist. Jerzy managed a variety of projects related to nuclear power in the United States, Spain, Iran, Chile, Norway, and South Korea. From 1984 to 1992, he held the position of physical scientist (GS-14) with the US Department of Energy (DOE) Nevada Operations Office (NVOO) on the Yucca Mountain Project responsible for managing the interaction between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the DOE/NVOO. In 1992, Jerzy resigned from his position with the DOE and co-founded the Technology and Resource Assessment of North America (TRAC-NA). He served on the board of directors of the TRAC-NA until 2002 and, in 1993, was elected president of the TRAC-South America branch. In this capacity, he managed major geological and seismological projects undertaken by the TRAC-SA in oilfields of Colombia and Peru. During his time in Colombia, Jerzy met his second wife, Isabel Szymanski (née Burgos, married in 1997) and had his second son, Adam Szymanski-Burgos, born in 1995 in Bogota, Colombia, eventually relocating together to Las Vegas, Nevada.

 Jerzy served as the project manager and consultant to the Attorney General of Nevada and the Nevada State Agency for Nuclear Projects. In this role he provided scientific support for licensing action in regard to the proposed underground repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain. Jerzy would come to spend much of the remainder of his life working on a set of scientific studies in collaboration with colleagues and concerned scientists aiming to call attention to the dangers of Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository site. The core findings of Jerzy’s studies on Yucca Mountain would come to be published in the 2018 book Understanding the Containment and Isolation Potential of Yucca Mountain: The Coupled Non-Equilibrium Dynamical Systems Perspective. 

 After decades of living in Las Vegas, Jerzy moved to Morro Bay, California in 2013 where he spent much of his time writing, making friends, and going for long walks in nature with his dog, Spike. In 2020, he relocated to Colorado. 

 In his work and travels around the world, Jerzy met with many adventures including being stranded in Iran during the outbreak of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and being kidnapped by ELN rebels in Colombia, allegedly charming them before being voluntarily released. 

 Above all, Jerzy was a man of integrity. He passionately sought to do the right thing, even when it was difficult, and was never willing to compromise his ideals. He had a deep, scientific curiosity of the natural world and worked hard to instill a love of learning to his sons. Jerzy would often say that the most important question was “Why?” At the same time, he was kind, charming, and exceedingly social. Through his openness and love of others, he gained many friends throughout his life, each one touched by his spark. 

An online gathering to honor Jerzy is tentatively scheduled for September 17th at 11am MST. In lieu of flowers or donations, we ask that family and friends spend time in nature, as Jerzy loved to do or listen to some of his favorite classical pieces including Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude, and Barber’s Adagio for Strings.