The evaluation of the thermal behaviour of an underground repository of the spent nuclear fuel

Abstract

The paper concerns the evaluation of the thermal behaviour of an underground repository of the spent nuclear fuel where the canisters are disposed at a vertical position in the horizontal tunnels. The formulation of thermo-elastic problems should regard the basic steps of the construction of the repository. We tested the influence of the distance between the deposition places on the thermo-elastic response of the rock massif. The problems are solved by the in-house GEM-FEM finite element software. One sided coupling allows a separate solution of the temperature evolution and the computation of elastic responses only in predefined time points as a post-processing to the solution of the heat equations. A parallel solution of the arising linear systems by the conjugate gradient method with a preconditioning based on the additive Schwarz methods is used. © 2008 Springer.