A Preliminary Study on the Methodology for Deriving an Optimized Spent Nuclear Fuel and Radioactive Waste Transport Route - 23475

Each country, including South Korea, establishes and operates a regulatory system for the transport of radioactive waste in consideration of the recommendations of international organizations and the characteristics related to radioactive waste in the country. In South Korea, radioactive waste is steadily generated mainly Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) and transported to disposal facility. And the demand for the transportation of radioactive waste in South Korea is expected to increase steadily because of decommissioning waste generated from NPPs in the future. Considering this prospect, to safely protect the public from effects caused by the transport of radioactive waste, it is necessary to establish a methodology for selecting an optimized transport route that can reasonably reduce the dose and dose risk due to transport. This study investigated and analyzed recommendations, guidelines, and studies related to land transport of radioactive waste. From this, this study deduced main factors for setting up a land transport route. The main Factors include the related regulations, transport distance, transport time, population density, road facilities such as bridges and tunnels, resident acceptability, site inspection, safety assessment for calculating dose and dose risk, etc. Meanwhile, in this study, a proposed a method for selecting the optimal land transport route for radioactive waste in South Korea considering those factors. If the method proposed in this study is applied to the case of land transport of radioactive waste in South Korea, it is expected to contribute to deriving an optimized land transport route in terms of radiological protection. In addition, the process of this method is expected to be a reference for establishing a method for deriving an optimized land transport route in a country in a similar situation to South Korea. Meanwhile, transport cost is expected to act as a main factor, but transport cost was not considered in this preliminary study. Thus, in the future, this study plan to continuously improve the method by reflecting the transportation cost as a main factor. (authors)