Journal
ENGINEERING GEOLOGY
Volume 218, Issue -, Pages 50-62Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.enggeo.2016.12.014
Keywords
Deep geological repository; Nuclear waste management; Nuclear waste disposal; Thermal modelling; Used nuclear fuel
Funding
- Nuclear Waste Management Organization
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This paper describes the thermal performance of a conceptual deep geological repository (DGR) involving a container for used CANDU (R) fuel and its placement concept in crystalline rock. For numerical reasons, separate near field and far-field models are usually used to model a DGR. In the near-field models, an adiabatic thermal condition is applied on the four vertical outside boundaries, and as such, this represents a repository with an infinite horizontal dimension. The results from such models are known to be accurate at early times, with the thermal response overestimated at longer times. To examine the influence of this boundary condition, a simplified near-field model is built using COMSOL and a method is developed to account for boundary condition effects. The method is validated by comparing the modified COMSOL results with a theoretical solution produced using HOTROK. The proposed method can be used in thermal modelling of a used-fuel DGR to obtain accurate results as long as the horizontal dimension of the near-field unit cell isvery small compared to the repository panel horizontal dimension (e.g., less than one tenth of the panel dimension). (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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