CCSC: Climate Change in the Safety Case

Project Dates: 01/09/2021 (start)

Project Status: Ongoing

Website: N/A

Climate-related process can affect the long-term safety of a repository for radioactive waste and the safety case for these facilities must take into account these potential impacts over timescales on the order of 1 million years. Changes significant in the context of geological disposal include variations in groundwater flow and chemistry, pressure change at depth, erosion and faulting. Drivers of these processes include glaciation, vegetation cover, stream incision and changes in sea level, precipitation and temperature.

The Climate Change in the Safety Case (CCSC) project is an ongoing IGD-TP project for the sharing of information about climate change and the respective approaches to modelling climate change and its effects on the safety of radioactive waste repositories. The project consists of an ongoing series of collaborative, climate-change focused, workshops between participating Waste Management Organisations (WMOs).

The broad objective of the project is to study the effect of climate change on the safety of radioactive waste repositories with a special emphasis on effects on the biosphere, geosphere and the similarities/differences between the approaches and implications for different WMOs.

The specific aims of the project are to:

• Stimulate the sharing of information about climate change simulations between partners.
• Identify the differences and similarities between the approches of participating WMOs.
• Identify regional and global differences in the adopted climate simulations.
• Ensure a traceable and reproducible argumentation for/against specific climate changes, especially if repository sites are within the same region that should be affected by the same climates at the same time.