Travel path/travel time uncertainties at salt sites proposed for high-level waste repositories: Topical report

Technical Report · Sun Jun 01 04:00:00 EDT 1986

OSTI ID:6900393

Andrews, R W; Kelley, V A; McNeish, J A; LaVenue, A M; Campbell, J E

The pre-waste-emplacement ground-water travel time from the edge of the disturbed zone to the accessible environment is a performance measure which must be quantified to address the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) siting criteria and the US Department of Energy's (DOE) siting guidelines. The prediction of ground-water travel time has a significant degree of uncertainty due to (1) the lack of site-specific hydrogeologic data, (2) the spatial variability of hydrogeologic parameters, (3) the hydrogeologic conceptual model uncertainty, and (4) the lateral extent of the disturbed zone and accessible environment. This uncertainty in the predicted travel time must be quantified to the greatest extent possible in order to aid the regulators in their analysis of the suitability of the candidate repository sites. The present document details the travel time uncertainty at the seven proposed salt sites. The approach taken to quantify this uncertainty was to take samples from the distribution of hydrogeologic parameters (using Latin hypercube sampling) and to conduct multiple realizations of the expected ground-water travel path and travel time. This approach produced a travel time probability distribution function from which relevant statistical measures of the travel time distribution may be derived. The code used to generate the travel time distribution is called PTRACK (Thompson et al., 1986). 78 refs., 85 figs., 38 tabs.

• Research Organization: Battelle Memorial Inst., Columbus, OH (USA). Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation; Intera Technologies, Inc., Austin, TX (USA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-87CH10290; AC02-83CH10140
• OSTI ID: 6900393
• Report Number(s): BMI/ONWI/C-214; ONWI-E512-02900/TR-36; ON: TI88016442
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

052002* -- Nuclear Fuels-- Waste Disposal & Storage
053000 -- Nuclear Fuels-- Environmental Aspects
11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE WASTES FROM NUCLEAR FACILITIES
COMPLIANCE
ENERGY SOURCES
FLOW RATE
FUELS
GEOLOGIC DEPOSITS
GROUND WATER
HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTES
HYDROGEN COMPOUNDS
HYDROLOGY
INFORMATION NEEDS
MANAGEMENT
MATERIALS
NUCLEAR FACILITIES
NUCLEAR FUELS
OXYGEN COMPOUNDS
RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS
RADIOACTIVE WASTE FACILITIES
RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT
RADIOACTIVE WASTES
REACTOR MATERIALS
REGULATIONS
SALT DEPOSITS
SITE CHARACTERIZATION
SPENT FUELS
UNDERGROUND DISPOSAL
WASTE DISPOSAL
WASTE MANAGEMENT
WASTES
WATER