Concept development of drift storage-and-disposal of Cs-wates

The main idea of pyroprocessing is the group separation of radionuclides to reuse the fissile nuclides and reduce the footprint of final repository. According to the current material balance, eight kinds of wastes will be generated from the pyroprocessing. Considering the relatively short half-life of Cs-137 and Sr-90, it is strongly recommended to store the wastes for several hundreds years at the surface facility and then dispose of them like low-level radioactive wastes. However, it is very difficult to operate the surface facility for several hundreds years. Thus, in this paper we propose a new concept to store and dispose of the Cs-spent filter wastes using drifts located around 300 meters below the ground surface. It was found that the direct application of such concepts was not feasible. Thus, we propose that the concept of the Yucca Mountain Repository was applied to the storage for more than 100 years and then the Canadian NWMO' s disposal concept is applied to the final disposal of the waste.