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Temperature and tortuosity effect on gas migration in a high-level waste disposal tunnel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

D. Justinavicius  and
P. Poskas
D. Justinavicius*
Affiliation:
Lithuanian Energy Institute, Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, Breslaujos str. 3, LT-44403 Kaunas, Lithuania
P. Poskas
Affiliation:
Lithuanian Energy Institute, Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, Breslaujos str. 3, LT-44403 Kaunas, Lithuania
*
*E-mail: darius.justinavicius@lei.lt
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Abstract

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Corrosion of steel canisters, disposed of in a repository for high-level waste (HLW), leads to generation of hydrogen gas for a long period after the repository's closure. The accumulation of hydrogen gas may lead to significant desaturation and unacceptable build-up of pressure in the backfilled disposal tunnels if the gas cannot escape through the low-permeability host rock. Consequently, the investigation of gas migration is of high relevance in the assessment of the repository's performance.

In this paper, the results of numerical investigations on gas migration performed using the computer code TOUGH2 (USA) are presented. The objective was to investigate migration of gas generated in a single disposal tunnel of a conceptual geological repository in a clay formation, which was suggested for benchmark studies in the European Commission project FORGE (Fate Of Repository GasEs). The analysis was focused on evaluation of the impact of an initial temperature in the repository and of different tortuosity models on gas migration. It was revealed that gas migration results were dependent on tortuosity model, while temperature variation in the repository had minor impact.

Keywords

geological disposalclay formationgas migration modellingtemperaturetortuosity model
Type
Research Article
Information
Mineralogical Magazine , Volume 79 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1317 - 1325
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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