The amount of waste that contains or is contaminated with radionuclides is increasing gradually due to the use of radioactive material in various fields including the operation and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. Such radioactive waste should be safely managed until its disposal to protect public health and the environment. Predisposal management of radioactive waste covers all the steps in the management of radioactive waste from its generation up to disposal, including processing (pretreatment, treatment, and conditioning), storage, and transport. There could be a lot of strategies for the predisposal management of radioactive waste. In order to comply with safety requirements including Waste Acceptance Criteria (WAC) at the radioactive waste repository however, the optimal scenario must be derived. The type and form of waste, the radiation dose of workers and the public, the technical options, and the costs would be taken into account to determine the optimal one. The time required for each process affects the radiation dose and respective cost as well as those for the following procedures. In particular, the time of storing radioactive waste would have the highest impact because of the longest period which decreases the concentrations of radionuclides but increases the cost. There have been little studies reported on optimization reflecting variations of radiation dose and cost in predisposal management scenarios for radioactive waste. In this study, the optimal storage time of radioactive waste was estimated for several scenarios. In terms of the radiation dose, the cumulative collective dose was used as the parameter for each process. The cost was calculated considering the inflation rate and interest rate. Since the radiation dose and the cost should be interconvertible for optimization, the collective dose was converted into monetary value using the value so-called “alpha value” or “monetary value of Person-Sv”.

Waste that contains or is contaminated with radionuclides arises from a number of activities involving the use of radioactive material. Such activities include the operation and decommissioning of nuclear facilities; the use of radionuclides in medicine, industry, agriculture, research and education. Radioactive waste must be safely disposed in a radioactive waste repository for the protection of public health and the environment. In order to safely dispose of radioactive waste in a repository, it is important to derive an optimal predisposal management scenario because radioactive waste must be processed (i.e. processing (pretreatment, treatment and conditioning), storage and transport) for satisfying waste acceptance criteria (WAC). Optimal scenario of predisposal management of radioactive waste is derived for considering the balancing of exposures of workers and/or those of members of the public, the short term and long term risk implications of different waste management strategies, the technological options available and the costs. However, existing studies for deriving the optimal scenario of predisposal management of radioactive waste have evaluated only the radiation dose of workers and public within given scenarios using fixed value, or have derived optimal single process (i.e. decontamination) of predisposal management using Multi-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) methodology. In this study, optimal predisposal management scenario is derived by evaluating exposures of workers using system dynamics (SD) technique. Radiation dose assessment SD model was modeled using VENSIM® code developed by VENTANA systems Inc.. SD Model has the advantage of being able to respond flexibly when decision makers want to change input data and it has the advantage of being able to track dynamically changing phenomena and visually confirm interdependence. After that, based on the SD model derived from this study, evaluations of exposures of public, cost, and technicality will be added to be utilized when establishing an optimal scenario of predisposal management of radioactive waste considering multi attribute.