The 41st annual Waste Management Conference (WM2015) was held in Phoenix, USA, on the 15ᵗʰ to 19ᵗʰ March 2015. The conference, which is organised by WM Symposia (WMS), concerns the management of radioactive waste and attracted around 2000 participants from across the world.
The technical programme included over 500 papers and 137 technical sessions and panels. France was represented as the feature country for 2015, with associated sessions, as well as a keynote speech from Virginie Schwarz, Director for Energy at the French Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy. The Savannah River Site, Nevada National Security Site and the Portsmouth and Paducah US Department of Energy (DOE) sites were also presented as feature programmes.
Russell Walke attended the conference to deliver a presentation on the post-closure safety assessment modelling undertaken by Quintessa on behalf of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) for OPG’s proposed deep geologic repository for low and intermediate level radioactive waste (DGR) at the Bruce nuclear site in Ontario, Canada. The paper described the assessment approach used and the modelling undertaken using Quintessa’s AMBER software. The assessment results demonstrate the safety of the proposed repository concept.