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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Deep geologic repository progress—2025 Update
Editor's note: This article has was originally published in November 2023. It has been updated with new information as of June 2025.
Outside my office, there is a display case filled with rock samples from all over the world. It contains a disk of translucent, orange salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.; a core of white-and-bronze gneiss from the site of the future deep geologic repository in Eurajoki, Finland; several angular chunks of fine-grained, gray claystone from the underground research laboratory at Bure, France; and a piece of coarse-grained granite from the underground research tunnel in Daejeon, South Korea.
Sai Chaitanya Tadepalli, Priti Kanth, P. V. Subhash
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 3 | December 2017 | Pages 282-293
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1367570
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The next generation nuclear facilities like Gen-IV fission reactors and fusion plasma will have a huge amount of activated waste production and resulting harmful consequences in terms of radioactive responses such as activity, decay heat, and dose. It is imperative to understand and quantify the impact of individual parent elements or isotopes in the material on major radiological responses. Such quantification serves as an impact indicator. This paper attempts to develop a method to aid this quantification that would eventually offer a complete material activation analysis. Here, we begin by presenting the mathematical formulation to account for the contribution of the parent constituents of any irradiated material toward the radiological responses directly, defined as the contributing factor (CF). The method is easily adaptable to other activation solvers and provides the user with CFs of parents that highlight the individual importance of the constituents. These factors can be used to determine the impact of elements on radiological quantities and how much tailoring of these elements will affect the radiological response of the material. All these can be done in a single run of the code, developed as an aid to activation solvers. Moreover, improved response of the modified material composition after reducing harmful parents can be directly calculated using the derived CFs without rerunning the solver. Thus, an optimized composition of the material either isotopically or elementwise can be easily obtained. A few examples highlighting the application of this technique and its importance are provided at the end.