Saturday, September 21, 2013

The reference designs for nuclear waste - Part 1

My philosophy is to come up with a reference 'clean' design that will succeed.  I estimate the cost and state the probability of success is 100%.  When I was with the old company, people would then scream and demand changes.  For every political change, I estimated how much more it would cost, how much more time, and the change in probability of success.  Most hated that!   But I will always remember the fun times when they let me run with it, and bring the project in.  My breakdowns were associated with massive interference.  :)

I did a lot of work on a repository, mainly in the area of seismic stability.  For that, we needed a good concept of the stresses, and what an ice age could do.  I discovered that our basement rock was at a state of maximum stress, it was being crunched by the settling on a cold mantle.  If there were low horizontal stresses, then there was a reason for it (lots of faults).  No faults on deep rock meant extreme stresses.

So ideally you wanted a large chunk of rock that was stress-relieved along distant boundaries.  Unfortunately, you never got that.

-to be continued, maybe

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