Geoscientific knowledge is essential to investigate safety requirements for the construction of a geological or surface disposal facility for radioactive waste at a specific selected site. Safety requirements include i) isolation of the nuclear waste from humans and the accessible biosphere, ii) containment by retention and retardation of radionuclides, iii) limited water inflow to the geo-engineered facility and iv) long-term geological stability of the site. For this reason, relevant topics included in this session, but not limited, are:
• Water-rock interactions, flow and transport studies in hydro(geo)logical site characterization
• Constraints on kinetics of water-rock interactions for ambient/elevated temperature, through data-model comparison
• Investigations on flow and transport in host rocks, soils and surrounding aquifers through groundwater dating and tracing of natural study cases
• Thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes with implications on radionuclide migration and multi-barrier system performance, radionuclide-rock interaction
• Characterization of natural and repository-induced bio-geo-chemical effects
• Linking hydrosphere, geosphere and biosphere in long-term evolution studies, including determining the rate of internal and external geodynamic processes and their effect on various sub-compartments of the disposal system (e.g., permafrost phenomenology, erosion, landscape evolution, effects of climate change)
• Development of new methodologies for site characterization and monitoring
• Data digitization/management and parameter collection
Contributions on the above topics can include all aspects covering lab-scale experimentation, large-scale experiments in underground research laboratories, information from site characterization campaigns, observation of natural analogues, physics- and data-driven modeling and code development. In this context, site characterization campaigns and natural analogues are particularly relevant in the up-scaling of data in space and time that were obtained on laboratory and/or in underground research laboratories (URL’s), and as such test future scenarios of long-term evolution.