One Step at a Time The Staged Development of Geologic Repositories for High-Level Radioactive Waste (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix E: Environmental Monitoring and Adaptive Staging
Appendix E: Environmental Monitoring and Adaptive Staging
Pages 174-181
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From page 174... ...
Monitoring the repository environment will be most feasible and most valuable for Adaptive Staging during the operational phase, after requisite baseline measurements have been acquired. If the operational phase were to begin with a preliminary pilot-scale activity, intensive in silo monitoring of the pilot disposal rooms, their environments, and their engineered barriers would be essential for learning and scaling up to a fully operational activity.
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From page 175... ...
One of the research priorities during the next few decades is to develop improved indirect methods to be used during the postclosure stage to monitor critical parameters within the repository. Monitoring in a repository program can serve a variety of purposes (IAEA, 2001 )
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From page 177... ...
, monitoring must detect any environmental changes that could affect the fate and transport of any potentially leaked radioactive materials, or that would significantly alter the assumptions made during site characterization and licensing. Before construction and operation, in the pre-closure stage, a comprehensive monitoring plan over the entire site must be developed to acquire a database of environmental information that characterizes the conditions, properties, and behavior at the site before any disturbance of background conditions.
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From page 178... ...
Understanding flow directions in a saturated zone entails defining the hydrostratigraphy and mapping the water table, potentiomeiric heads in deeper aquifers, and the three-dimensional distribution of equipotential surfaces. The definition and monitoring of the flow field is itself a staged operation,
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From page 179... ...
includes a detailed discussion of the state of the art of monitoring the vadose zone and points out that "the field is rapidly evolving toward new and more sophisticated methods...." Aside from repository considerations, Yucca Mountain constitutes a field laboratory for innovative new methodologies for characterizing and monitoring unsaturated zone flow. However, for repositories that would be situated deep in the saturated zone, as are most proposed sites throughout the world, knowledge of the details of flux through the unsaturated zone are not critical to the evaluation of site safely.
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From page 180... ...
Monitoring provides one basis for performance confirmation, because it provides data representing direct and indirect observations of the natural and engineered systems that comprise the geologic repository. Scientific analysis of monitoring data provides the second basis for performance confirmation, as it is the process by which observed behavior will be compared with expected behavior and the significance of deviations evaluated.
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From page 181... ...
On the other hand the monitoring program provides data to both of these programs and must receive direction and guidance from the other two programs while its products and output feed data for their respective analyses; the monitoring program would likely have few functions independent of the needs of the other two programs. FIGURE E.2 Venn diagram showing conceptual relationship among the monitoring, fong-term science and technology, and performance confirmation programs.
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