Climate adaptation in the spent fuel storage and disposal facilities: A literature review

Abstract

Climate adaptation is part of the process our society is using to cope with climate change and the changes that it will bring to our environment over the coming years. Unfortunately, in some ‘high-risk’ industries (e.g., nuclear) and specifically in some areas such as spent fuel management, climate adaptation has received little attention. In 2016, the total spent fuel inventory was 265, 000 tonnes of heavy metal (HM) in storage and 127, 000 t HM was sent to reprocessing. In general, the spent fuel reduces its radiotoxicity to a natural level after hundreds to thousands of years. This timeframe surpasses that of severe changes that are expected to occur on our planet because of climate change. So, climate adaptation should be considered.As such, a literature review has been performed to acquire knowledge and identify gaps in the literature related to climate adaptation measures in long-term spent fuel storage. For this, a systematic review was performed that included the screening of 693 studies and a full-text analysis (e.g., purpose, methodology, findings, limitations) of 67 studies. Several literature gaps were revealed that included the lack of (1) local climate vulnerability assessment for nuclear power plants, (2) climate adaptation for spent fuel storage (e.g., on-site and centralized facilities (3) climate adaptation measures for long-term storage or final repositories.