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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 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.
X. Gaus-Liu, A. Miassoedov, J. Foit, T. Cron, F. Kretzschmar, Alexander Palagin, T. Wenz, S. Schmidt-Stiefel
Nuclear Technology | Volume 181 | Number 1 | January 2013 | Pages 216-226
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 14th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics (NURETH-14) / Fission Reactors; Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-A15769
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The LIVE-L4 and LIVE-L5L experiments investigated the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the corium pool in the reactor pressure vessel lower head with the three-dimensional test vessel LIVE. The simulant material is a noneutectic binary mixture of 20% NaNO3-80% KNO3. Transient and steady-state parameters such as melt temperature and heat flux distribution through the vessel wall as well as crust formation characteristics were obtained. The two tests demonstrated that transient events like repeated melt relocation and change of decay power density facilitate crust deformation and change of crust thickness. Massive crust formation in a noneutectic melt pool leads to a change of melt pool composition and a decrease of melt-crust interface temperature. The melt temperature and heat flux at the same pool height and same power density can be roughly compared independent of heating history and initial melt pouring pattern. The dimensionless melt temperature as well as the dimensionless heat flux through the wall during the steady state are independent of power density if the pools have the same height. But, they are dependent on the pool height. For a low pool, the gradients with height of both melt temperature and heat flux through the vessel are larger than those for a high pool.