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Risk assessment as a framework for decisions.

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1035665

The risk assessment approach has been applied to support numerous radioactive waste management activities over the last 30 years. A risk assessment methodology provides a solid and readily adaptable framework for evaluating the risks of CO2 sequestration in geologic formations to prioritize research, data collection, and monitoring schemes. This paper reviews the tasks of a risk assessment, and provides a few examples related to each task. This paper then describes an application of sensitivity analysis to identify important parameters to reduce the uncertainty in the performance of a geologic repository for radioactive waste repository, which because of importance of the geologic barrier, is similar to CO2 sequestration. The paper ends with a simple stochastic analysis of idealized CO2 sequestration site with a leaking abandoned well and a set of monitoring wells in an aquifer above the CO2 sequestration unit in order to evaluate the efficacy of monitoring wells to detect adverse leakage.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Laboratories
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000
OSTI ID:
1035665
Report Number(s):
SAND2010-8538C
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English