Full scale 3D-modelling of the coupled gas migration and heat dissipation in a planned repository for radioactive waste in the Callovo-Oxfordian clay

Abstract

An important question related to the long-term safety performance of a repository for long-lived medium and high-level radioactive waste in the Callovo-Oxfordian clay unit is the impact of heat and gas generated in the waste emplacement areas on the gas and water pressure and on the water saturation in the backfilled repository and in the host rock. The current design of such a repository consists of a multitude of different underground structures, such as emplacement drifts for waste canisters and other types of waste packages, access and ventilation drifts, and access shafts in the central part of the repository. The individual underground structures exhibit different thermo-hydraulic and geometrical properties yielding a large and complex system for the flow and transport of gas, water and heat. A detailed 3D modelling of the entire repository would require a tremendous computational effort, even when using high performance simulator codes. A newly developed method ( Poller et al., 2011) allows for the 3D modelling of the two-phase gas–water flow and thermal evolution in the entire repository/host-rock system in a simplified manner. Besides accounting for both the detailed structures at local scale and the global geometry of the drift network, it also allows for an assessment of the gas phase pressure as well as the hydrogen and heat fluxes developing over the complete lifetime of the repository system. In this paper, the results of a reference scenario are presented. The assessment focuses on the two dominant processes, i.e. the dissolution and diffusion of the generated hydrogen, and the advective migration of the forming hydrogen gas phase in space and time (up to 1 million years). Further, the main findings of a sensitivity analysis on different features, physical processes and parameter uncertainty are presented.