Status of geological disposal of high level radioactive waste in korea

초록

In Korea, 24 nuclear power plants(NPP) are operating at present and its total generation capacity is 21,716MW of electricity, which is 6th largest nuclear power supplier in the world. From the operation of NPPs, significant amount of radioactive wastes had been produced and stored temporarily in different ways. A repository for low and intermediate level waste was constructed and actual disposal process was started recently. Currently, the hot issue for sustainable utilization of nuclear energy is the safe management of high-level radioactive waste(HLW), which should be managed for more than 10,000~100,000 years. Since 1997, a long term R&D program has been carried out to develop a disposal system with a consideration of the characteristics of the HLW and geological formations in the Korean peninsula. A Korean Reference System(KRS) and an Advanced Korean Reference System(AKRS) could be suggest from the R&D program for the geological disposal of spent fuel and the disposal of HLW produced from pyro-processing, respectively. For the validation of the disposal system an underground research tunnel called KURT(KAERI Underground Research Tunnel) was constructed and various in situ tests had been carried out. Fig.1 shows the layout of AKRS. In this study, the status of geological disposal of HLW and in situ tests carried out at KURT will be presented.