The Geological Disposal Concepts for the High Level Radioactive Wastes from a Spent Fuel Recycling Process in Korea-9297 *

The electricity generated from the nuclear power plants is around 40 % of the total required electricity in Korea and according to the basic energy development plan, this proportion will be raised up to about 60 % in the near future. To implement this plan, the most important factor is the back-end fuel cycle, namely a safe management of the spent fuel or high level radioactive wastes from the nuclear power plants. Various researches are being carried out to manage spent fuel effectively in the world. In our country, as one of the management alternatives which is more effective and non-proliferation, the pyroprocessing method is being actively developed to retrieve reusable uranium and TRU, and to reduce the volume of high level waste from a Nuclear power plant. This is a new dry recycling process. In this paper, the amount of various wastes and their characteristics are estimated for a pyro-process. Based on the information, the geological disposal alternatives are developed. According to the amount and the characteristics of each waste, the concepts of the waste packages and the disposal containers are developed. And also from the characteristics of the radioactivity and the heat generation, a multi-layer depth is considered to dispose of these wastes. The various proposed alternatives in this paper can be used as input data for the design of a deep geological disposal system. And they will be improved through the application of real site data and a safety assessment in the future. After that, the final disposal concept will be selected with various assessments and its optimization will be carried out.