Publications

Yucca Mountain 2008 performance assessment: Incorporation of seismic hazard curve uncertainty

Helton, Jon C.; Sallaberry, Cedric J.

The possible effects of epistemic uncertainty in the seismic hazard curve used in the 2008 performance assessment (PA) for the proposed repository for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain (YM), Nevada, are investigated. The analysis establishes that it is possible to propagate epistemic uncertainty in the seismic hazard through the computational structure used in the 2008 YM PA and to investigate the effects of this uncertainty on expected dose to a reasonably maximally exposed individual from seismic ground motion events with sensitivity analysis procedures based on Latin hypercube sampling, partial rank correlation, and stepwise rank regression. The dominant analysis inputs affecting the epistemic uncertainty in the indicated dose were found to be the residual stress level at which stress corrosion initiates in the Alloy 22 outer corrosion barrier for waste packages and the seismic hazard curve.