Deep Geological Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste: Current State and Future Challenges

Management of spent nuclear fuel (SF) and high level waste (HLW) is one of the most important and challenging problems of the modern world. Otherwise clean, cheap, constant and secure way to produce electricity, nuclear power plants create large amounts of highly hazardous waste. Repositories – deep geological disposal facilities (GDF) for these types of waste must prevent radionuclide from reaching the biosphere, for up to 1 000 000 years, migrating from deep (more than 300 m), stable geological environment. At present, there are no operating GDFs for SF and/or HLW, mostly due to difficult and complex task of preparing safety case and licensing. The purpose of this chapter is to validate the generic R&D activities in this area, and present alternative concepts of radioactive waste (RW) management: retrievability, reversibility, regional GDFs, long-term storage or deep borehole disposal, demonstrating the main engineering tasks in solving the problem of RW management and disposal.