Geologic media impacts upon repository design

As part of the National Waste Terminal Storage (NWTS) Program policy of evaluating a number of different geologic environments for nuclear waste disposal, several specific geologic media are being studied within the NWTS program. A number of detailed conceptual designs have been prepared for mined geologic repositories, based upon widely varying requirements for waste capacity, waste receipt rate, retrievability, waste package type, and other important parameters. The Alternate Geologic Media Engineering Studies (AGMES) reported upon here focus on the evaluation of comparable repository designs and costs in three selected geologic media; salt, basalt, and tuff. This paper should be of interest to persons seeking a better understanding of the parts that make up a repository, the relationship of those parts to the regulatory requirements for a repository, the impacts that geologic media have upon those parts, and costs to construct comparable repositories in various media