Publications

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This report describes the current status of the safety case for the deep borehole disposal (DBD) concept. It builds on the safety case presented in Freeze et al. (2016), presenting new information and identifying additional information needs for specific safety case elements. At this preliminary phase of development, the DBD safety case focuses on the generic feasibility of the DBD concept. It is based on potential system designs, waste forms, engineering, and geologic conditions; however, no specific site or regulatory framework exists. Updated information is provided for the following safety case elements: * pre-closure basis and safety analysis, * post-closure basis and performance assessment, and * confidence enhancement. This research was performed as part of the deep borehole field test (DBFT). Based on revised U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) priorities in mid-2017, the DBFT and other research related to a DBD option was discontinued; ongoing work and documentation were closed out by the end of fiscal year (FY) 2017. This report was initiated as part of the DBFT and documented as an incomplete draft at the end of FY 2017. The report was finalized by Sandia National Laboratories in FY2018 without DOE funding, subsequent to the termination of the DBFT, and published in FY2019. iii

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Post-closure performance assessment (PA) calculations suggest that deep borehole disposal of cesium (Cs)/strontium (Sr) capsules, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) waste form (WF), is safe, resulting in no releases to the biosphere over 10,000,000 years when the waste is placed in a 3-5 km deep waste disposal zone. The same is true when a hypothetical breach of a stuck waste package (WP) is assumed to occur at much shallower depths penetrated by through-going fractures. Cs and Sr retardation in the host rock is a key control over movement. Calculated borehole performance would be even stronger if credit was taken for the presence of the WP.

PFLOTRAN is well-established in single-phase reactive transport problems, and current research is expanding its visibility and capability in two-phase subsurface problems. A critical part of the development of simulation software is quality assurance (QA). The purpose of the present work is QA testing to verify the correct implementation and accuracy of two-phase flow models in PFLOTRAN. An important early step in QA is to verify the code against exact solutions from the literature. In this work a series of QA tests on models that have known analytical solutions are conducted using PFLOTRAN. In each case the simulated saturation profile is rigorously shown to converge to the exact analytical solution. These results verify the accuracy of PFLOTRAN for use in a wide variety of two-phase modelling problems with a high degree of nonlinearity in the interaction between phase behavior and fluid flow.

Probabilistic simulations of the post-closure performance of a generic deep geologic repository for commercial spent nuclear fuel in shale host rock provide a test case for comparing sensitivity analysis methods available in Geologic Disposal Safety Assessment (GDSA) Framework, the U.S. Department of Energy's state-of-the-art toolkit for repository performance assessment. Simulations assume a thick low-permeability shale with aquifers (potential paths to the biosphere) above and below the host rock. Multi-physics simulations on the 7-million-cell grid are run in a high-performance computing environment with PFLOTRAN. Epistemic uncertain inputs include properties of the engineered and natural systems. The output variables of interest, maximum I-129 concentrations (independent of time) at observation points in the aquifers, vary over several orders of magnitude. Variance-based global sensitivity analyses (i.e., calculations of sensitivity indices) conducted with Dakota use polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) and Gaussian process (GP) surrogate models. Results of analyses conducted with raw output concentrations and with log-transformed output concentrations are compared. Using log-transformed concentrations results in larger sensitivity indices for more influential input variables, smaller sensitivity indices for less influential input variables, and more consistent values for sensitivity indices between methods (PCE and GP) and between analyses repeated with samples of different sizes.

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The Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) Campaign of the U.S. Depat ment of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Office of Fuel Cycle Technology (OFCT) is conducting research and development (R&D) on geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high level nuclear waste (HLW). Two high priorities for SFWST disposal R&D are design concept development and disposal system modeling (DOE 2011, Table 6). These priorities are directly addressed in the SFWST Geologic Disposal Safety Assessment (GDSA) work package, which is charged with developing a disposal system modeling and analysis capability for evaluating disposal system performance for nuclear waste in geologic media. This report describes specific GDSA activities in fiscal year 2018 (FY 2018) toward the development of GDSA Framework, an enhanced disposal system modeling and analysis capability for geologic disposal of nuclear waste. GDSA Framework employs the PFLOTRAN thermal-hydrologic-chemical multiphysics code (Hammond et al. 2011a; Lichtner and Hammond 2012) and the Dakota uncertainty sampling and propagation code (Adams et al. 2012; Adams et al. 2013). Each code is designed for massivelyparallel processing in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. Multi-physics representations in PFLOTRAN are used to simulate various coupled processes including heat flow, fluid flow, waste dissolution, radionuclide release, radionuclide decay and ingrowth, precipitation and dissolution of secondary phases, and radionuclide transport through engineered barriers and natural geologic barriers to the biosphere. Dakota is used to generate sets of representative realizations and to analyze parameter sensitivity.

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U.S. knowledge in deep geologic disposal in crystalline rock is advanced and growing. U.S. status and recent advances related to crystalline rock are discussed throughout this report. Brief discussions of the history of U.S. disposal R&D and the accumulating U.S. waste inventory are presented in Sections 3.x.2 and 3.x.3. The U.S. repository concept for crystalline rock is presented in Section 3.x.4. In Chapters 4 and 5, relevant U.S. research related to site characterization and repository safety functions are discussed. U.S. capabilities for modelling fractured crystalline rock and performing probabilistic total system performance assessments are presented in Chapter 6.

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The Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) Campaign of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy (NE), Office of Fuel Cycle Technology (OFCT) is conducting research and development (R&D) on geologic disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high level nuclear waste (HLW). Two high priorities for SFWST disposal R&D are design concept development and disposal system modeling (DOE 2011, Table 6). These priorities are directly addressed in the SFWST Generic Disposal Systems Analysis (GDSA) work package, which is charged with developing a disposal system modeling and analysis capability for evaluating disposal system performance for nuclear waste in geologic media (e.g., salt, granite, shale, and deep borehole disposal).

This report provides an update to Sassani et al. (2016) and includes: (1) an updated set of inputs (Sections 2.3) on various additional waste forms (WF) covering both DOE-managed spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and DOE-managed (as) high-level waste (HLW) for use in the inventory represented in the geologic disposal safety analyses (GDSA); (2) summaries of evaluations initiated to refine specific characteristics of particular WF for future use (Section 2.4); (3) updated development status of the Online Waste Library (OWL) database (Section 3.1.2) and an updated user guide to OWL (Section 3.1.3); and (4) status updates (Section 3.2) for the OWL inventory content, data entry checking process, and external OWL BETA testing initiated in fiscal year 2017.

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This paper considers concepts for disposal of canistered high-level (radioactive) waste (HLW) in large diameter deep boreholes. Vitrified HLW pour canisters are limited in diameter to promote glass cooling, and constitute a large potential application for borehole disposal where diameter is constrained. The objective for disposal would be waste packages with diameter of 22 to 29 inches, which could encompass all existing and projected HLW glass inventory in the United States. Deep, large diameter boreholes of the sizes needed have been successfully drilled, and we identify other potentially effective designs. The depth of disposal boreholes would be site-specific, and need not be as deep as the 5 km being investigated in the Deep Borehole Field Test. For example, a 0.91 m (36 inch) diameter borehole drilled to 3 km could be used for disposal from 2.5 to 3 km (8, 200 to 9, 840 ft). The engineering feasibility of such boreholes is greater today than was concluded by earlier studies done in Sweden and the United States. Moreover, the disposal concept and generic safety case have evolved to a point where borehole construction need not be as elaborate as previously assumed. Each borehole in the example could accommodate approximately 100 waste packages containing canisters of vitrified HLW. Emplacement of the packages would be through a 32-inch (0.81 m) guidance casing, installed in two sections to reduce hoisting loads, and forming a continuous pathway from the surface to total depth. Above the disposal zone would be a nominal 1 km (3, 280-ft) seal interval, similar to previously published concepts. Following those concept studies, the seal system would consist of alternating lifts of swelling clay, backfill and cement. Above the seal zone the borehole would be plugged with cement in the conventional manner for oil-and-gas wells. The function of seals in deep borehole disposal is to maintain the pre-drilling hydrologic regime in the crystalline basement, where groundwater is increasingly saline, stagnant, and ancient. Seals would resist fluid movement and radionuclide transport during an early period of waste heating, but after cooling little fluid movement is expected. Thus, the function of seals could be less important with HLW that has low heat output, and sealing requirements could be limited. The safety case for deep borehole disposal relies on the prevalence of groundwater that is increasingly saline with depth, stagnant, and ancient, in crystalline basement rock that has low bulk permeability and is isolated from surface processes. The minimum depth for disposal depends on sitespecific factors, and may be less than the 2.5 km example. Rough-order-of-magnitude cost estimates show that deep borehole disposal of HLW would be cost-competitive with the lowest cost mine repository options. Thinner overburden, and shallower development of conditions favorable to waste isolation, could make drilling of large-diameter disposal boreholes even more cost effective. The dimensions of the disposal zone and seal zone would be site specific, and would be adjusted to ensure that both are situated in unaltered crystalline basement rock.

An important feature required in all geological disposal system modeling is proper representation of waste package degradation and waste form dissolution. These processes are often treated as batch operations, meaning they are zero-dimensional. However, waste package canister degradation or waste form dissolution are affected by near-field conditions, and thus they must be coupled to the computational domain through the exchange of information on local conditions. Accurate waste package and waste form degradation behavior is essential because processes occurring at the batch level also affect far field conditions through heat and mass transport by advection or diffusion. Presented here is the development and performance of the Waste Form Process Model, an integrated module for waste package canister degradation and waste form dissolution developed by Sandia National Laboratories within PFLOTRAN. PFLOTRAN is an open source, massively parallel subsurface simulator for multiphase, multicomponent, and multiscale reactive flow and transport processes in porous media. PFLOTRAN is used to model geologic disposal systems for the Spent Fuel and Waste Science and Technology (SFWST) Campaign under the Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition Program of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy.

Numerical simulation of a repository for heatgenerating nuclear waste in fractured crystalline rock requires a method for simulating coupled heat and fluid flow and reactive radionuclide transport in both porous media (bentonite buffer, surface sediments) and fractured rock (the repository host rock). Discrete fracture networks (DFNs), networks of two-dimensional planes distributed in a three-dimensional domain, are commonly used to simulate isothermal fluid flow and particle transport in fractures, but unless coupled to a continuum, are incapable of simulating heat conduction through the rock matrix, and therefore incapable of capturing the effects of thermally driven fluid fluxes or of coupling chemical processes to thermal processes. We present a method for mapping a stochastically generated DFN to a porous medium domain that allows representation of porous and fractured media in the same domain, captures the behavior of radionuclide transport in fractured rock, and allows simulation of coupled heat and fluid flow including heat conduction through the matrix of the fractured rock. We apply the method within Sandia's Geologic Disposal Safety Assessment (GDSA) framework to conduct a post-closure performance assessment (PA) of a generic repository for commercial spent nuclear fuel in crystalline rock. The three-dimensional, kilometer-scale model domain contains approximately 4.5 million grid cells; grid refinement captures the detail of 3, 360 individual waste packages in 42 disposal drifts. Coupled heat and fluid flow and reactive transport are solved numerically with PFLOTRAN, a massively parallel multiphase flow and reactive transport code. Simulations of multiple fracture realizations were run to 1 million years, and indicate that, because of the channeled nature of fracture flow, thermally-driven fluid fluxes associated with peak repository temperatures may be a primary means of radionuclide transport out of the saturated repository. The channeled nature of fracture flow gives rise to unique challenges in uncertainty and sensitivity quantification, as radionuclide concentrations at any given location outside the repository depend heavily on the distribution of fractures in the domain.