Three of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories are participating in an international survey aimed at testing the long-term effectiveness of safety systems that could be used in the storage of high-level radioactive waste, according to a press release this week.
Lawrence Berkeley, Sandia and Los Alamos (LANL) National Laboratories are working alongside Swiss national rad waste disposal organization Nagra on the project, dubbed HotBENT, for High Temperature Effects on Bentonite Buffers, according to a Tuesday media statement from Berkeley Labs. The project’s research team includes representatives from the DOE sites as well as researchers from Canada, Japan, the U.K. and others, the press release said.
HotBENT’s main focus is on how heat from high-level nuclear waste buried underground affects the material encasing it over time. The project is evaluating how well bentonite, a natural clay-based material used as a buffer around buried canisters of waste, “retains its safety functions when exposed to simulated long-term heating,” Berkeley Labs said.
“A demonstrated higher temperature tolerance could allow for more radioactive waste to be safely packed within tunnels in the Earth’s subsurface,” the press release said.
The HotBENT project, which began in September, is being carried out at Switzerland’s Grimsel Test Site, a location in the Swiss Alps designated by Bern in 1984 to be used for radioactive waste disposal testing. Berkeley, Sandia and LANL are doing supplemental research and modeling for the project stateside, the release said.
Meanwhile, the U.S. still lacks an operating facility that can permanently house spent nuclear fuel. The only congressionally-authorized site for such a purpose, Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, has remained little more than a hole in the ground since the Barack Obama administration in 2010 pulled the site’s funding and canceled its license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Joe Biden administration has already committed not to fund Yucca Mountain in the 2022 fiscal year. Instead, the White House has focused on soliciting input about making a search for a federally operated interim storage site — which currently cannot open until a permanent repository does — more inclusive and mindful of disadvantaged communities.
