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REVIEW article

Front. Nucl. Eng.
Sec. Radioactive Waste Management
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnuen.2024.1433247
This article is part of the Research Topic EURAD: State of the Art in Research and Development on Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal View all 3 articles

Assessment of the chemical evolution at the disposal cell scale -Part I -Processes at interfaces and evolution at disposal cell scale

Provisionally accepted
Erika Neeft Erika Neeft 1Guido Deissmann Guido Deissmann 2Diederik Jacques Diederik Jacques 3*
  • 1 COVRA NV, Nieuwdorp, Netherlands
  • 2 Julich Research Center, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres (HZ), Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
  • 3 Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK CEN), Mol, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Within the framework of the European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management, the work package ACED -Assessment of chemical evolution of intermediate level (ILW) and high level (HLW) waste at disposal cell scale -uses combined experimental and modelling methods in a multiscale approach with process integration to improve the long-term modelling and assessment of the chemical evolution at the disposal cell scale. This work together with Part II gives a comprehensive overview of methods and approaches to combine knowledge and tools into numerical models that assess the long-term evolution. Part I provides the relevance of the assessment of the chemical evolution for safety, performance, and optimization. It further describes the main characteristics of disposal cells for ILW and HLW waste in European disposal programmes. From that, a number of interfaces between different types of material are identified that are highly relevant for many national disposal programs: glass-steel, steel-concrete, steel-clay, steel-granite, concrete-clay, and concretegranite. Based on literature review, the main processes and consequences occurring at these interfaces due to chemical gradients are described. The key element is the narrative of the general evolution at the disposal cell scale based on process knowledge.

    Keywords: Radioactive waste disposal, Chemical evolution, Vitrified waste, Cementitious materials, Steel, clay, Granite

    Received: 15 May 2024; Accepted: 01 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Neeft, Deissmann and Jacques. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Diederik Jacques, Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK CEN), Mol, Belgium

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