On 16 March 2011, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) received a licence application submitted by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) for construction of a spent nuclear fuel repository to be located in Forsmark, Östhammar Municipality. SSM have appointed international experts to assist in its review of this licence application. Quintessa has been awarded framework agreements to assist in the review of two topics: the performance of the engineered barrier system (EBS); and the review of SKB’s safety assessment methodology and consequence analysis.
SKB’s KBS-3 Disposal Concept for Spent Nuclear Fuel
To date, Quintessa has completed four studies:
- to review of SKB's treatment of the EBS in SR-Site, including SKB’s coupled thermal, hydraulic, mechanical and chemical modelling of its evolution, and to undertake independent modelling of buffer resaturation/homogenisation and copper canister corrosion (download);
- to consider whether SKB’s methodology to abstract features, events, processes, as well as site information and other data, into assessment models for radionuclide transport is appropriate and sufficient for its purpose (download);
- to review SKB’s MARFA code and consider whether the technical arguments and assumptions used for developing the code are sound, appropriate and adequate to support its use in SR-Site (download); and
- to consider whether the landscape models and supporting data utilised by SKB are appropriate and fit for purpose (download).
Each study synthesised the main review findings and provided recommendations to SSM for specific requests that it could make to SKB for clarification and further work.
Images courtesy of SKB