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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep Space: The new frontier of radiation controls
In commercial nuclear power, there has always been a deliberate tension between the regulator and the utility owner. The regulator fundamentally exists to protect the worker, and the utility, to make a profit. It is a win-win balance.
From the U.S. nuclear industry has emerged a brilliantly successful occupational nuclear safety record—largely the result of an ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) process that has driven exposure rates down to what only a decade ago would have been considered unthinkable. In the U.S. nuclear industry, the system has accomplished an excellent, nearly seamless process that succeeds to the benefit of both employee and utility owner.
Manuel Lorenzo Sentís
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 2 | August 2014 | Pages 117-130
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-84
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
FORGE (Fate of Repository Gases) is an international research project supported by funding under the European Commission FP7 Euratom program and lasting four years from 2009 to 2013. The project is dedicated to understanding gas generation and migration as part of the quantitative assessment of a geological repository for radioactive waste. Within the FORGE project, Work Package 1 is dedicated to numerical modeling of a two-phase flow system (hydrogen gas due to corrosion and groundwater) in a geological repository for radioactive waste. Several benchmark exercises were proposed that cover the modeling of a deep geological repository from the disposal cell scale to the repository scale with different codes. During the definition of the exercises, special emphasis was given to the roles of the excavation-disturbed zone and of the interfaces between materials, which could act as a conduit for preferential flow. Some changes were made in the TOUGH2 code to enable the implementation of the prescribed conditions, models, and parameters of the benchmark. The results of the calculations performed with different codes show that TOUGH2 gives comparable results under the numerically challenging conditions defined in the exercise. Some differences were observed resulting from the use of different codes and also from some simplifications in the parameters and models adopted by the participating teams. In this paper, the cell-scale benchmark exercise and the results obtained by the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI) with TOUGH2 will be described, together with some difficulties encountered during the simulation, e.g., convergence problems. The results of other teams participating in the benchmark are in good agreement with the ENSI results.