A geological repository has been proposed for the permanent disposal of the nation's high level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. The containers for this waste must remain intact for the unprecedented service lifetime of 1000 years. A combination of engineering, regulatory, and licensing requirements complicate the container material selection. In parallel to gathering information regarding the Yucca Mountain service environment and material performance data, a set of selection criteria have been established which compare candidate materials to the performance requirements, and allow a quantitative comparision of candidates. These criteria assign relative weighting to varied topic areas such as mechanical properties, corrosion resistance, fabricability, and cost. Considering the long service life of the waste containers, it is not surprising that the corrosion properties of the material is a dominant factor.

Subject
Costs, Test methods, Materials, Materials performance, Yucca mountain, Materials selection, Containment, Nuclear waste, Material degradation, Engineering, Scale, Wastes, Oxidation
© 1990 Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of AMPP. Positions and opinions advanced in this work are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of AMPP. Responsibility for the content of the work lies solely with the author(s).
1990
Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP)
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