Deliverable D2:Consolidation of needs of the european wasten management agencies and the regulator of the consortium: Work Package 1, Site-specific and palaeo environmental data. Modelling sequential biosphere systems under climate change for radioactive waste disposal. (BIOCLIM)

The nature of long-lived radioactive wastes is that they present a radiological hazard over a period of time that is extremely long compared with the timescale over which the engineered protection systems and institutional management of a disposal, or long-term storage, facility can be guaranteed. Safety assessments for potential deep repositories need to be able to provide indicators of safety performance over time periods of hundreds of thousands of years. On such timescales, it is generally assumed that radionuclides may be slowly released from the containment system, migrating via geosphere pathways until they reach the accessible environment. Hence, there is a need to study the evolution of the environment external to the disposal system and the ways in which this might impact on its long-term radiological safety performance, for example in terms of influences on the migration and accumulation of radionuclides.