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Some Notes on the KBS-3V Disposal Concepts for Spent Nuclear Fuels in Korea
- 언어ENG
- URLhttps://db.koreascholar.com/Article/Detail/430434
p.146
Around 40 years ago, in the mid-1980s, Swedish government approved the KBS-3 method for the direct disposal of spent nuclear fuels (SNF) in Sweden. Since then, this method has become a reference for many countries including Korea, Republic of. The main ideas of the KBS-3 method are to locate SNF at 500 m below the ground surface using a copper disposal canister and a bentonite buffer. In 2016, our government announced the National Plan (NP 2016) regarding the final management of high-level waste (HLW) in Korea. In 2019, new committee were organized to review the NP 2016, and they submitted the final recommendations to the government in 2021. Finally, the government announced the 2nd National Plan in December, 2021. So far, KAERI has developed the technologies related to the final management of SNF in two directions. One follows ‘direct disposal’ based on the KBS-3 concept, and the other ‘recycling’ based on ‘pyroprocessing-and-SFR’ (PYRO-SFR). Even though Posiva and SKB obtained the construction permits with the KBS-3 method in Finland and Sweden, respectively, there are still several technical obstacles to applying directly to our situations. Some examples are as follows: high burnup, huge amounts of SNF, and high geothermal gradient in Korean peninsula. In this work, we try to illustrate some limits of the KBS-3 method. Within our country, currently, the most probable disposal option is the KBS-3 type geological disposal, but no one knows what the best option will be in 20 or 30 years if those kinds of drawbacks are considered. That is, we compare the effects of the drawbacks using our geological data and characteristics of spent fuels. Last year, we reviewed alternative disposal concepts focusing on the direct disposal of SNF and compared the pros and cons of them in order to enhance the disposal efficiency. We selected four candidate concepts. They were multi-level disposal, deep borehole disposal, sub-seabed disposal and mined deep borehole matrix. As mentioned before, KAERI has developed a pyroprocessing technology based on the SFR to reuse fissile radionuclides in SNF. Even though we can consume some fissile nuclides such as 239Pu and 241Pu using PYRO-SFR cycle, there still remain many long-lived radionuclides such as 129I and 135Cs waiting for the final disposal. The authors review and propose several concepts for the future final management of the long-lived radionuclides.
