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Norway’s Halden reactor takes first step toward decommissioning
The government of Norway has granted the transfer of the Halden research reactor from the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) to the state agency Norwegian Nuclear Decommissioning (NND). The 25-MWt Halden boiling water reactor operated from 1958 to 2018 and was used in the research of nuclear fuel, reactor internals, plant procedures and monitoring, and human factors.
Tianfu Xu, Rainer Senger, Stefan Finsterle
Nuclear Technology | Volume 174 | Number 3 | June 2011 | Pages 438-451
Technical Paper | TOUGH2 Symposium / Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11751
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
After closure of an underground nuclear waste repository, the decay of radionuclides will raise the temperature in the repository, and the bentonite buffer will resaturate by water inflow from the surrounding host rock. The perturbations from these thermal and hydrological processes are expected to dissipate within hundreds to a few thousand years. Here, we investigate coupled thermal-hydro-chemical processes and their effects on the short-term performance of a potential nuclear waste repository located in a clay formation. Using a simplified geometric configuration and abstracted hydraulic parameters of the clayey formation, we examine geochemical processes, coupled with thermohydrologic phenomena, and potential changes in porosity near the waste container during the early thermal period. The developed models were used for evaluating the mineral alterations and potential changes in porosity of the buffer, which can affect the repository performance. The results indicate that mineral alteration and associated changes in porosity induced by early thermal and hydrological processes are relatively small and are expected to not significantly affect flow and transport properties. Chlorite precipitation was obtained in all simulation cases. A maximum of one percent volume fraction of chlorite could be formed, whose process may reduce swelling and sorption capacity of bentonite clay, affecting the performance of the repository. The illitization process was not obtained from the present simulations.