EGU22 General Assembly – Session on Deep Geological Repositories – Geosciences in the Site Selection Process

The EGU General Assembly 2022 will bring together geoscientists from all over the world for one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, planetary, and space sciences. The EGU aims to provide a forum where scientists, especially early career scientists, can present their work and discuss their ideas with experts in all fields of geoscience.

The last two General Assemblies, Sharing Geoscience Online in 2020 and vEGU21: Gather Online, were organized as virtual meetings due to the Covid-related restrictions. In 2022, the EGU aims to provide an on-site experience again for those attending in-person, while at the same time introducing new concepts to include virtual attendees as much as possible. The EGU General Assembly 2022 (EGU22) will be a conference with a virtual component where everybody is welcome, in person or online! The format of the conference is to be flexible, giving the opportunity to more easily adapt to the uncertain global context.

As part of the conference, a dedicated session on geosciences in the deep geological repository site selection process is being convened by Vanessa Montoya (UFZ), Koen Beerten (SCK-CEN), Andreas Reinicke (NAGRA) and Alwina Hoving (TNO).

Geoscience knowledge is essential to investigate safety requirements that are established by national agencies to construct a geological disposal for high-level and/or long-lived radioactive waste in a specific selected site. Safety requirements include isolation of the nuclear waste from humans and the accessible biosphere, containment by retention and retardation of contaminants, limited water flow to the geo-engineered facility and long-term geological stability of the site. Experiences in many countries have shown that acceptable conditions for selecting a construction site can be found in diverse rock types as granites, metamorphic basement rocks, plastic clays, indurated claystones, evaporites, porous volcanic tuffs and highly compacted volcanic tuffs.

Geoscientists are tackling challenging issues to support the site selection process. These include hydraulic testing in low permeability formations, appropriate selection of borehole testing fluids, porewater characterization, radionuclide-rock and rock-water interactions, geo-mechanical testing of clay rocks, characterization and classification of fractures in crystalline rock, fracture network modelling, development of long-term site evolution models, management of large amount of data obtained during the site characterization phase, integration of diverse geoscientific data and the development of plausible future evolution scenarios. For this reason, in this session, relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Data digitalization/management and parameter collection
• Development of new methodologies for site characterization (i.e., rock characterization)
• Laboratory-scale, underground research laboratories and large-scale mock-up experiments
• Radionuclide migration in rocks
• Natural analogues and/or full scale in situ testing
• Modelling and upscaling of coupled processes: Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical-Chemical/Biological (T-H-M-C /B)
• Repository induced effects (i.e., gas formation/reactivity, temperature changes, induced seismicity and chemical reactions).
• Long-term geological evolution scenarios including natural processes which may impact the geosphere over very long timescales, including tectonics/neotectonics (uplift, subsidence, faulting), climate change and its effect on groundwater flow and composition (i.e., global warming/cooling with permafrost development), and climatic and/or tectonic induced erosion (i.e. glacial erosion)
• Code and model development and uncertainty treatment

The abstract deadline is 12 January 2022.

Further information about the General Assembly is available at https://www.egu22.eu/ and the webpage about this specific session may be accessed at https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU22/session/43550