Comparing the prospectivity of hydrogeological settings for deep radioactive waste disposal
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PAPER
Comparing the prospectivity of hydrogeological settings for deep radioactive waste disposal E. V. Hipkins 1 & R. S. Haszeldine 1 & C. I. McDermott 1 Received: 13 July 2019 / Accepted: 5 May 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Nuclear power has the potential to provide significant amounts of reliable electricity generation without carbon dioxide emissions. Disposing of radioactive waste is, however, an ongoing challenge, and if it is to be buried, the characterisation of the regional groundwater system is vital to protect the anthroposphere. This aspect is understudied in comparison to the engineered facility; yet, selecting a suitable groundwater setting can ensure radionuclide isolation hundreds of thousands of years beyond that provided by the engineered structure. This paper presents a multi-faceted scoping tool to quantitatively assess, and directly compare, the regional hydrogeological prospectivity of different groundwater settings for disposal at an early stage of the site selection process. The scoping tool is demonstrated using geological data from three distinct UK groundwater settings as a case study. Results indicate a significant difference in the performance potential of different regional groundwater settings to ensure long-term waste containment. Keywords Groundwater flow . Waste disposal . Numerical modelling . UK
Introduction Nuclear power provides a reliable and low carbon source of electrical energy, currently accounting for 21% of the total UK electricity production (BEIS 2017). An unfortunate byproduct of this process is the generation of highly radioactive and chemical-toxic waste (NDA 2017), which must be managed safely. By 2125 the UK is predicted to have 4.77 million m3 of packaged radioactive waste requiring management (NDA 2017). The chosen international approach is to dispose of the most radioactive of this waste (approx. 650,000 m3 in the UK (NDA 2014)) within a deep geological disposal facility (GDF) situated 200–1,000 m below the ground surface (Apted and Ahn 2017; NDA 2013, 2014; Streffer et al. 2011). Sweden and Finland are the only countries to have
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-020-02182-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * E. V. Hipkins [email protected] 1
School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Grant Institute, King’s Buildings, Edinburgh EH9 3FE, UK
officially selected disposal locations for their higher activity civil waste legacy. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the USA is accepting military-derived radioactive waste. All other waste producing nations (including the UK) remain in the search phase. Geological disposal facilities must be designed as a series of complimentary yet independent physical and chemical barriers (IAEA 2009, 2011a). These barriers are intended to contain and isolate the waste within the subsurface for many hundreds of thousands to millions of years (Environment Agency 2009; IAEA 2011a; RWM 2016a). Typical reposi
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