THEREDA revisited – project status in 2013

Safety analysis for a geological repository for radioactive waste as well as remediation measures for uranium mining and processing legacies share an essential: the need for a reliable, traceable and accurate assessment of potential migration of toxic constituents into the biosphere. The respective computational codes require site-independent thermodynamic data concerning aqueous speciation, solubility limiting solid phases and ion-interaction parameters. Such databases, however, show several constraints:

• Incompleteness in terms of major and trace elements
• Inconsistencies between species considered and corresponding formation constants
• Restricted variation ranges of intensive parameters (temperature, density, pressure)
• Limitations with respect to solution compositions (ionic strength)

To overcome these limitations to a significant degree, an ambitious database project – THEREDA – has been launched in 2006 by institutions leading in the field of safety research for nuclear waste disposal in Germany