The Greenland Analogue Project. Yearly Report 2010

The deep geological repository concept is being considered in a number of countries that are designing and/or incorporating practical solutions for the long-term management and effective isolation of spent nuclear fuel. Long-term management requires that the spent nuclear fuel and associated decay by-products are kept isolated from the biosphere on a time scale of at least hundreds of thousands of years. Within this time frame glacial conditions are expected to occur in cycles in regions that have been glaciated in the past two to ten million years. Climate induced changes, such as the growth of ice sheets and permafrost, will influence and alter the ground surface and subsurface environment, including its hydrology, which may impact repository safety. Glaciationtion impact assessments have, to-date, used simplified models and conservative assumptions, for example in the representation of ice sheet hydrology, that do not reflect the complexity of natural systems and processes. This is largely due to lack of direct observations of such processes from existing ice sheets, which if more readily available could help reduce uncertainties and provide a strong scientific basis for the treatment of glacial impacts in safety assessments. Our current understanding of the hydrological, hydrogeological and hydrogeochemical processes associated with cold climate conditions and glacial cycles, and their impact on the long-term performance of deep geological repositories for spent nuclear fuel, will be significantly improved by studying a modern analogue