Skip to main content

REVIEW article

Front. Nucl. Eng.
Sec. Radioactive Waste Management
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnuen.2024.1433257
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 5 articles

Assessment of the chemical evolution at the disposal cell scale -Part II -Gaining insights into the geochemical evolution

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

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

    Long time frames are to be considered in the safety and performance assessment of deep geological disposal of intermediate and high level radioactive waste. Geochemical conditions will change in the waste, conditioning matrix, waste package, engineered barriers and the host rockall components present at the disposal cell scale. This aspect of geological disposal was the focus of the work package ACED (Assessment of chemical evolution of intermediate level (ILW) and high level (HLW) waste at disposal cell scale) in the EURAD project (the European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management). The first part of this review provided a narrative of the geochemical evolution of the disposal cell. In this second part, an overview is given about methods and approaches that can be used to gain further insights into the processes driving the geochemical evolution, more in particular (i) laboratory and in-situ experiments, (ii) archaeological and natural analogues, and (iii) modelling tools. The review concludes with a short discussion on the consequences on material properties, waste forms and radionuclide mobility.

    Keywords: Radioactive waste disposal, Disposal cell, Chemical evolution, experimental methods, analogues, reactive transport

    Received: 15 May 2024; Accepted: 19 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Deissmann, Neeft 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

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.