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Requirement of the assessment strategy for biosphere in mature safety cases for nuclear waste repositories – Finland case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

A. T. K. Ikonen
A. T. K. Ikonen*
Affiliation:
Environmental Research and Assessment EnviroCase, Ltd., Hallituskatu 1 D 4, 28100 Pori, Finland
*
*E-mail: ari.ikonen@envirocase.fi
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Abstract

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In safety assessments for nuclear waste disposal, the biosphere is a completely open system, whereas the bedrock can be treated with comparably simple boundary conditions. The bedrock has a vital role in providing and maintaining favourable conditions for the waste, but the public interest tends to focus on the biosphere. More importantly, the bedrock groundwater does arrive from the biosphere. Also, the regulations usually set the safety criteria in terms of doses occurring in the biosphere. Thus, it is reasonable to address the biosphere as a part of the disposal system, performance of which should be described based on conceptual models that cover phenomena and processes controlling radionuclide release and transport. From these, the actual assessment models and data are expected to be derived based on high-level research and expertise obtained through empirical study. In this paper, the complexity expected of a biosphere assessment within a mature safety case is discussed through the example of the Finnish regulations and recent safety cases for nuclear waste disposal. Both elaborate and complex presentations and stylised approaches have their benefits, and a balance needs to be sought.

Keywords

safety casesafety assessmentnuclear waste disposalrequirementscomplexityconfidence
Type
Research Article
Information
Mineralogical Magazine , Volume 79 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1607 - 1612
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2015. This is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2015

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