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Thermal dimensioning to determine acceptable waste package loading and spatial configurations of heat-generating waste packages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Simon Myers ,
David Holton  and
Andrew Hoch
Simon Myers
Affiliation:
AMEC, Building 150, Harwell Oxford, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QB, UK
David Holton*
Affiliation:
AMEC, Building 150, Harwell Oxford, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QB, UK
Andrew Hoch
Affiliation:
AMEC, Building 150, Harwell Oxford, Didcot, Oxfordshire OX11 0QB, UK
*
*E-mail: David.Holton@amec.com
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Abstract

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Heat-generating waste provides a number of additional technical challenges over and above those associated with the disposal of ILW. A priority area of work for Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) concerns the effect of heat on the engineered barrier system, and how this may be mitigated through the management of heat (thermal dimensioning) in a UK Geological Disposal Facility (GDF). The objective of thermal dimensioning is to provide a strategy to enable acceptable waste package loading and spatial configurations of the packages to be determined in order to enable high-heat generating waste to be successfully disposed in a GDF. An early focus of the work has been to develop a thermal modelling tool to support analyses of different combinations of package assumptions and other GDF factors, such as spacing of those packages, to assess the compliance with thermal limits. The approach has a capability to investigate quickly and efficiently the implications of a wide range of disposal concepts for the storage of spent fuel/HLW and the dimensions of a GDF. This study describes the approach taken to undertaking this work, which has included a robust appraisal of the key data (and the associated uncertainty); recent thermal dimensioning analysis has been performed to identify constraints on those disposal concepts.

Keywords

thermal dimensioningwaste packagesheat-generating wasteGeological Disposal FacilityGDF
Type
Research Article
Information
Mineralogical Magazine , Volume 79 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 1625 - 1632
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

References

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