Technical Advancements and Issues Associated with the Permanent Disposal of High-Activity Wastes: Lessons Learned from Yucca Mountain and Other Progra

This report from the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board "is not meant to be an assessment of the licenseability of a Yucca Mountain repository. If licensing goes forward, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will determine whether a license should be granted. ... The purpose of this report, then, is to extract from the history of the Yucca Mountain program, and to a lesser degree from other programs, some of the technical “lessons learned” that may apply to future U.S. programs for waste management and waste disposal."

"The United States has a variety of waste forms with different chemical and physical properties because of their generation through defense activities, reactor-development work, and electricity production. Specialized deep geologic disposal methods that take advantage of these differences may be reasonable to consider. A possible scenario is using deep geologic repositories that permit retrieval of spent nuclear fuel and boreholes that preclude retrieval of waste forms that offer few or no further recycling advantages, such as vitrified high-level waste."

Deep Borehole Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Waste -- NWTRB

This paper from the Nuclear Waste Techical Review Board describes deep borehole disposal as "a type of geologic disposal in which spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and solid high level radioactive waste (HLW) are isolated from the environment by emplacement in boreholes at depths from two to five kilometers (Km) beneath the land surface.

Key aspects of deep borehole disposal addressed in this fact sheet are safety, capacity, technical feasibility and technical challenges. Safety results from the geologic isolation of the radioactive materials and depends strongly on the characteristics of the geologic environment."