Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste: a Primer (original) (raw)

Deep Geological Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste

Handbook of Research on Advancements in Environmental Engineering

Management of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SF) and High-Level Waste (HLW) is one of the most important and challenging problems of the modern world. Otherwise a clean, cheap, constant, and secure way to produce electricity, nuclear power plants create large amounts of highly hazardous waste. Repositories—deep Geological Disposal Facilities (GDF)—for these types of waste must prevent radionuclides from reaching the biosphere, for up to 1,000,000 years, migrating from a deep (more than 300m), stable geological environment. At present, there are no operating GDFs for SF and/or HLW, mostly due to the difficult and complex task of preparing safety cases and licensing. The purpose of this chapter is to validate the generic R&D activities in this area and present alternative concepts of Radioactive Waste (RW) management: retrievability, reversibility, regional GDFs, long-term storage, and deep borehole disposal, demonstrating the main engineering tasks in solving the problem of RW management and di...

Development and Demonstration Program on the Geological Disposal of Long-Lived and High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Fuel in a Clay Formation : Status and Trends

2001

Within the Belgian program for the management of longlived and highlevel radioactive waste (HLW), the Boom Clay is studied as a potential host rock for deep disposal. This paper gives an update on progress and achievements of Research, Development & Demonstration (RD&D) programs at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center SCK•CEN. At SCK•CEN, large interdisciplinary RD&D programs combining underlying and applied science have contributed to extensive expertise on disposal in clay. In this paper, recent developments in a number of keyareas are highlighted. In particular, emphasis is on: • Investigations concerning the geological disposal of organic waste forms (bituminized reprocessing waste and alpha-contaminated cellulose waste); • The in situ testing of cement-clay interactions and the assessment of the consequences of these interactions for the development of the alkaline plume; • The CORALUS experiment, which is an integrated in situ experiment for the detailed investigation of the in...