With South Korea increasingly focusing on nuclear energy, the management of spent nuclear fuel has attracted considerable attention in South Korea. This study established a novel procedure for selecting safety-relevant radionuclides for long-term safety assessments of a deep geological repository in South Korea. Statistical evaluations were performed to identify the design basis reference spent nuclear fuels and evaluate the source term for up to one million years. Safety-relevant radionuclides were determined based on the half-life criteria, the projected activities for the design basis reference spent nuclear fuel, and the annual limit of ingestion set by the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission Notification No. 2019-10 without considering their chemical and hydrogeological properties. The proposed process was used to select 56 radionuclides, comprising 27 fission and activation products and 29 actinide nuclides. This study explains first the determination of the design basis reference spent nuclear fuels, followed by a comprehensive discussion on the selection criteria and methodology for safety-relevant radionuclides.

Spent nuclear fuel management is a high-priority issue in South Korea, and addressing it is crucial for the country’s long-term energy sustainability. The KORAD (Korea Radioactive Waste Agency) is leading a comprehensive, long-term project to develop a safe and effective deep geological repository for spent nuclear fuel disposal. Within this framework, we have three primary objectives in this work. First, we conducted statistical analysis to assess the inventory of spent nuclear fuel in South Korea as of 2021. We also projected future generation rates of spent nuclear fuels to identify what we refer to as reference spent nuclear fuels. These reference spent nuclear fuels will be used as the design basis spent fuels for evaluating the safety of the repository. Specifically, we identified four types of design basis reference spent nuclear fuels: high and low burnup from PLUS7 (with a 16×16 array) and ACE7 (with a 17×17 array) assemblies. Second, we analyzed radioactive nuclides’ inventory, activities, and decay heats, extending up to a million years after reactor discharge for these reference spent nuclear fuels. This analysis was performed using SCALE/TRITON to generate the burnup libraries and SCALE/ORIGEN for source term evaluation. Third, to assess the safety resulted from potential radioactive nuclides’ release from the disposal canister in future work, we selected safety-related radionuclides based on the ALI (Annual Limit of Intake) specified in Annex 3 of the 2019-10 notification by the NSSC (Nuclear Safety and Security Commission). Conservative assumptions were made regarding annual water intake by humans, canister design lifetime, and aquifer flow rates. A safety margin of 10-3 of the ALI was applied. We selected 56 radionuclides that exceed the intake limits and have half-lives longer than one year as the safety-related radionuclides. However, it is crucial to note that our selection criteria focused on ALI and half-lives. It did not include other essential factors such as solubility limits, distribution coefficients, and leakage processes. So, some of these nuclides can be removed in a specific analysis area depending on their properties.

While many countries consider direct disposal of the spent nuclear fuels, they need to consider long-term disposal scenarios with severe accidents such as the contact between underwater and the spent nuclear fuel due to large defect of the canister. Radionuclides releases rapidly with contacting water or slowly with dissolution of UO2 matrix. The former is known as the ‘Instant Release’, and the latter is ‘Congruential Release’. Even though the instant release fractions (IRF) are much smaller than the congruential ones, IRF has to be treated carefully due to the fact that the instant releases lead to much larger value of the exposure dose rates than the congruential ones which proceed very slowly. It is known that the exposure dose rates by the instant releases are ~25 times larger than the one by the congruent release. The radionuclides from UO2 matrix migrate to the grain boundary, make bubbles, and make tunnels, which leads to instant releases of some radionuclides. The radionuclides in the gap between UO2 pellet and cladding can be also instantly released. In addition, the radionuclides in the crud are instantly released. But in this paper, nuclides from the crud are not regarded, due to the lack of the leaching data. Meanwhile, there’re some nuclides that released from the construction materials like the cladding, the Rod Cluster Control Assembly (RCCA), or the other metal parts. In this work, IRF values for major IRF nuclides such as Cs, I, Cl, Se for the reference PWR spent fuels of South Korea were evaluated based on the rationale from literatures’ review. In particular, these evaluations were done as the function of fission gas release (FGR), average discharge burnup, and fuel dimensions. In addition, the values of IRF for the other nuclides were also suggested based on the other institutes.

Understanding the dispersion of xenon isotopes following a nuclear test is critical for global security and falls within the remit of both the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the International Noble Gas Experiment (INGE). This paper aims to show if it is possible to discriminate the source of xenon releases based on the atmospheric dispersion of xenon isotopes using HYSPLIT. Using ORIGEN and SERPENT simulations, four released scenarios are defined with four different fractionation times (i.e., 1 hour, 1 day, 10 days, and 30 days) after a 1kt TNT equivalent 235U explosion event. These time-delayed release scenarios were selected to certify the possibility of mis-determining xenon release source. We use the Lagrangian dispersion model for atmospheric dispersion to predict the concentration distribution of xenon isotopes under each scenario. The model allows us to better understand how these isotopes would distribute over time and space, offering valuable data for real-world detection efforts. To our knowledge, there have been no researches on the analysis of xenon isotopic ratios considering atmospheric dispersion. In this work, we focused on the atmospheric dispersion using HYSPLIT to characterize the xenon isotopic ratios from nuclear tests. In addition, we compared the xenon isotopic ratios obtained from the atmospheric dispersion with those from ORIGEN calculations, which would be helpful to discriminate the source of the xenon releases.