Fate of contaminants from repositories for radioactive waste based in clay-rock?

Safe disposal of radioactive waste is one of the big challenges of modern society. The concept of final storage in deep geological formations has become internationally accepted as a means of safe waste management waste in order to isolate it from the Biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. The safety case has hence to prove that migration from the disposal site into the Biosphere can be effectively prevented across this time span. The potential migration is primarily controlled by sorption/desorption processes onto mineral surfaces along the migration path. Clay minerals are major constituents in both the engineered barriers and in the argillaceous host rock formations being considered for the deep high-level radioactive waste (HLW) repository in Switzerland. Therefore it is critically important to develop an understanding of the uptake processes of radionuclides on clay minerals and other minerals under a wide range of relevant geochemical conditions, to quantify and characterize them with the aim of strengthening the confidence in the safety case. An overview of the work performed at the Laboratory for Waste Management on the retention of radionuclides on clay rich materials will be presented.