Special requirements for geotechnical characterization of host rocks and designing of a radioactive waste repository

Abstract

The safe management of radioactive wastes and spent fuels is one of the greatest technicalscientific challenges of 21st century. Radioactive wastes and spent fuels must be isolated safely from the biosphere until they become harmless as a result of decay process of radioisotopes. It takes even a few hundred thousands or one million years in some cases. Recently the final disposal in a stable geological environment seems to be the only feasible way for that. It is an unusual and multidisciplinary task to select an appropriate host rock, characterize that, design and construct an underground facility (including the engineering barriers), which fits to the features of geological barrier completely. Numerous special requirements to be taken into account both for earth-scientist and geo-engineers have been conceived worldwide during the last few decades. This paper tries to summarize the most important radwaste-specific issues of the geotechnical characterization programmes and the functional and static design of a repository, by introducing some example from the Hungarian L/ILW repository (National Radioactive Waste Disposal-NRWR at Bátaapáti) and the characterisation programme preparing the Hungarian HLW/SF (Boda).