A collection of safety arguments, analyses and evidence the purpose of which is to demonstrate that the disposal system will be safe during the operational and post-closure phase and to prove that the system meets regulatory safety requirements.
Published in Chapter:
Deep Geological Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste: Current State and Future Challenges
Želimir Veinović (University of Zagreb, Croatia), Biljana Kovačević Zelić (University of Zagreb, Croatia), and Dubravko Domitrović (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Copyright: © 2015
|Pages: 33
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-7336-6.ch014
Abstract
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 disposal.