Nuclear Waste Disposal and Storage

Current practices for managing used nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste demand progressively larger spatial footprints as they move from wet storage to dry casks and, ultimately, to geological disposal. In a densely populated country such as Korea, this linear expansion presents a major limitation. The challenge will intensify with the increasing use of high-burnup fuels from PWRs and diverse advanced reactor fuels used in MSRs, VHTRs, and LMFRs. Our research seeks to reverse this trend by developing compact and flexible waste management strategies that ensure long-term safety while minimizing land use at acceptable costs.

The performance of disposal and storage systems is primarily governed by thermal constraints that arise from materials degradation and chemical reactions at elevated temperatures. As repositories become more compact and efficient, they inevitably face high-temperature, chemically complex environments that accelerate copper corrosion, waste-form dissolution, and bentonite alteration, ultimately influencing radionuclide migration within engineered barriers.

 

To address these challenges, our group combines time-dependent, spatially resolved multiphysics modeling with advanced experimental characterization to quantify and predict degradation and radionuclide transport in evolving engineered barrier systems.