Lifetime Predictions for Nuclear Waste Disposal Containers Available to Purchase

Predicting the long-term corrosion behavior of containers for the disposal of nuclear waste requires making predictions over timescales of up to 1 million years. The development of models to predict container failure times and, more importantly, the development of a thorough mechanistic understanding of the corrosion processes involved have progressed significantly over the past 40 years. This paper focuses on lifetime prediction and presents a brief review of the different approaches that have been used in various international nuclear waste programs to predict those corrosion processes that are, and are not, expected to occur in the repository environment. An example of one such mechanistically-based approach, a reactive-transport model for the prediction of the corrosion of copper containers in a deep geological repository, is presented.