Performance Assessments of Geologic Repositories for High-Level Nuclear Waste: Are they Necessary or Sufficient ?
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Performance Assessments of Geologic Repositories for High-Level Nuclear Waste: Are They Necessary or Sufficient? Rodney C. Ewing Department of Geological Sciences and Department of Nuclear Engineering & Radiological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1063, USA. ABSTRACT Performance assessments of geologic repositories for high-level nuclear waste will be used to determine regulatory compliance. The determination, that with a “reasonable expectation” regulatory limits are met, is based on the presumption that all of the relevant physical, chemical and biological processes have been modeled with enough accuracy to insure that a confident judgment of safety may be made. For the geologic disposal of high-level nuclear waste, this generally means that models must be capable of calculating radiation exposures to a specified population at distances of tens of kilometers for periods of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. A total system performance assessment will consist of a series of cascading models that are meant in toto to capture repository performance. There are numerous sources of uncertainty in these models: scenario uncertainty, conceptual model uncertainty and data uncertainty. These uncertainties will propagate through the analysis, and the uncertainty in the total system analysis must necessarily increase with time. For the highly-coupled, non-linear systems that are characteristic of many of the physical and chemical processes, one may anticipate emergent properties that cannot, in fact, be predicted. For all of these reasons, a performance assessment is not in and of itself a sufficient basis for determining the safety of a repository, but it remains a necessary part of the effort to develop a substantive understanding of a repository site. INTRODUCTION In 1738, Jacques de Vaucanson, a French watchmaker, created a life-sized mechanical duck (Fig. 1), one of several of his famous automatons. From its description (see Glimcher’s Decisions, Uncertainty, and the Brain [1]), this was a remarkable creation that could move its head, flap its wings and even eat from a bowl of grain. The grain was mechanically compacted and finally excreted. To many, this mechanical creation appeared to be a duck – moving and eating as if it were a duck. This mechanical duck relied on the interaction of gears and springs, each designed to capture some aspect of a duck’s behavior. Over four hundred parts moved each wing. Taken as a whole, the individual mechanical parts created a machine that mimicked many of the characteristic behaviors of a duck. Vaucanson’s mechanical duck is to a real duck, as a performance assessment is to the real behavior of a geologic repository for nuclear waste. The structure of a performance assessment (Fig. 2) is, in its essence, the same as the structure of Vaucanson’s duck. A performance assessment consists of many parts, usually represented by computer codes, that are meant to capture the behavior of a high-level nuclear waste geologic repository over large spatial (tens o
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