Quality assurance in thermodynamic databases for performance assessment studies in waste disposal

Performance assessment studies in underground disposal of radioactive or toxic waste need to consider all reactive interactions between waste and its surroundings. Thermodynamic equilibrium and reaction path calculations represent an important tool for this purpose. The reliability of the results depends first of all on the quality of the thermodynamic database used for the calculations. Several quality criteria of thermodynamic databases are discussed in connection with the characteristics of current database projects [Nuclear Energy Agency Thermochemical Database (NEA-TDB), Yucca Mountain database, Dortmund Databank (DDB), Common Thermodynamic Database (CTD), FreeGS, and Thermodynamic Reference Database (THEREDA)] including the situation for molten salts. The future role of the IUPAC standard for thermophysical and thermochemical data storage is emphasized.
Keywords: thermodynamic databases; radioactive waste disposal; geochemical databases; ThermoML; performance assessment studies.