To dispose of spent nuclear fuel, the most promising method is disposal in a deep geological repository with a multi-barrier system. Among the multi-barrier system, canisters are used to contain the spent nuclear fuel. A role of the canister is to withstand corrosion load from the deep geological environment as possible as long. Corrosion processes consist of corroding agents transport to the canister surface and electrochemical reactions between the corroding agents and the canister surface. According to previous King’s electrochemical experiments, the mass-transport rate of corroding agents is slower than the electrochemical reaction rate with copper when the canister is surrounded by dense bentonite blocks. Therefore, the mass-transport rate is a rate-determining step for the whole corrosion process. Despite of the importance of transportation of oxidizing agents in bentonite, the transportation process was not paid attention. For example, existing models which are called continuum models assumed that the corroding agents pass through the pore in the porous medium because the continuum model does not consider the fracture networks in the bentonite. Here we develop a dualpermeability and dual-porosity model. In this model, the transport of corroding agents is considered that they pass through fracture within the porous medium. The difference between the dual-permeability and dual-porosity model is whether the corroding agents can pass through the pore. The dual-permeability model assumed that the mass-transport occurs within both fracture and porous medium. On the other hand, the dual-porosity model assumed that the mass-transport occurs only within fractures. Through both models, we found that the transport rate in the fractures is much higher than through the pores, and the canister lifetime at a point where contacting the fracture tip is much shorter than other parts when the canister lifetime is calculated by the transport-governed condition. In addition, the temperature distributions in the fracture are different compared to the existing continuum model. Our results show the effect of fractures in terms of not only corroding agents transport but also the canister lifetime. We anticipate our model to be a first step for the corrosion estimation model coupled with fracture networks.

• Samuel Park(Seoul National University, 1, Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul)
• Nakkyu Chae(Seoul National University, 1, Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul)
• Sungyeol Choi(Seoul National University, 1, Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul) Corresponding author