Sandia Earth Sciences Nuclear Waste Management

[Music] Sandia National Labs has had an earth sciences program since the inception of the institution and we've added on to that a nuclear waste management set of activities since the 1970s this 50-year history has allowed us to contribute to the Yucca Mountain project to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and other repository and nuclear waste management programs the basic skill set that we bring to this is to connect the basic Earth Sciences with a set of systems analysis tools and then being able to understand the risk analysis and be able to tell that in a cohesive narrative to the regulatory communities in the federal and state level when I first came to Sandia I was it there weren't any other geoscientists acting on a role but but that you know it did change rapidly over the years and it's because the projects at Sandia fell into or developed or convinced do we should be pursued required a geotechnical sort of background from some of the staff sandy had a great reputation they still do but then of course I thought they were they were godlike that's why I chose to work for sandy and was lucky enough to be hired I came into a group used to be called the nuclear waste management systems division but he was established in support of the NRC Commission so the the main job of that group which he started in the in the mid 70s here around 76 77 was to develop healthy NRC develop their their tools and approaches and methodologies for being able to license a nuclear waste repository about the time in late 74 when things changed again with waste management back at headquarters they came looking for in-house laboratory in state laboratory to take over the equip activities and they came to Sandia because sandy was an engineering lab and engineering was the job that remained to be done because they had a site and all we had to do that involved in the aspect of geology was drill two more holes and take the core which we did and discovered it on the site so we went on from there developing quite a program this was 1989 1992 15 years yeah and WIPP was just in a transition from being a research project to being a licensing project certification this EPA term and then eventually of an operating facility but they that transition from a research project to a regulatory project was it was on the Sandia struggled with and I was I was fortunate to come in at just the right time because that's what I really wanted to work on because they applied aspects of how you get a site through the regulatory process so you know when we're doing a risk assessment there are basically three questions is called the risks Triplett is what can happen how likely it is to happen and what are the consequences if it happens Sandia added a fourth question to that which is how reliable is the information because of all the uncertainties associated with that and we were doing a lot of the development of those you know the scenario and the scenario methodology which became internationally recognized the largest issue we faced was actually answering the question of do we know enough you know I it's inherent in decision-making which is what regulations are all about that you have to make decisions with incomplete knowledge you just have to and whereas research science wants to learn as much more as it can so the challenge we were faced with was what research do we not need to be doing rather than what research do we need to be doing what can we go to the customer the day away and say you're done here you can take this one to the EPA and make them decide yes or no one of the largest efforts by Sandia has to do it with what they call performance assessment and performance assessment is a set of probability codes calculations of things that happen based on in certain evolutions of the underground certain scenarios playing out called performance assessment it helps to think of it as a in terms of uncertainty it it's a big it's an uncertainty analysis by which I mean that what what we do have to do we have to do it well is justify the range of uncertainty that we're going in with we don't know if the answer is really sir if they don't know any answer to any question exactly but we know within some range and at some distribution impossible but if we can show that then that entire range uncertainty it doesn't matter the sight is good enough the site is safe then we're good to go in that that same reasoning you can use it everywhere it phrase the question of how confident are we and what we know what are the ranges in what we know and can we live with that uncertainty in what we present to a decision maker last thing we wanted them to do was to go ahead with a a regulatory case that it was poorly founded within and it's up to us to make sure they didn't do that then they were they were really pleased discovered that there was a team at Sandia they had a way to get their report do we got its final certification on weapon may of 1998 so there was there was a good energy bright looking future we had the license and we had the certificate to go forward and so on our work with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant which began in the mid-70s provided a foundation of earth science and risk assessment capabilities that then establish Sandia as a contributor for the Yucca Mountain project why did you go to Yucca Mountain well because Sandia provides exceptional service of the national interest this job is put to bed where's the next problem and no you didn't have to look very far because the Yucca Mountain project was in deep trouble first of all technically it's it's a much more complicated problem because mostly was the gate-source fact that waste generates a lot of heat and so that changes the chemistry it changes in hydrology changes the response of the rock but it was also more complicated institutionally the [Music] the deal we had historically interacted directly with half a dozen different national laboratories and the Amadou contractor had was much larger more powerful and less focused and a whip contract to the westinghouse in those days the nuclear waste Policy Act 1987 and the commitment by the DOA was that they would they would accept civilian ways by 1998 1998 in 2004 they had not even submitted the license application for construction okay do the arithmetic they were roughly about 20 years behind schedule and in 2006 Sandhya and was Andrew RL was the lead figure in this action started in 2005 put together a proposal to the do II to have Sandhya take on a lead laboratory role analogous the one we had on with so instead of dia we instead of having multiple National Laboratories reporting dysfunctional II to an EMA no there would be one national laboratory reporting directly a day away baby we accepted the proposal I mean if they put it back out for bid to all the labs and then awarded leave that role to Sandia in 2006 so we use the the the regulation as the framework for start developing the license application then we start analyzing okay what are the key messages that we want to send on the each one of these requirements and how does it tie together then with the challenge it was a challenge to to make the argument that it's safe it doesn't mean it wasn't safe it's just that it has an awful lot of moving parts you have to explain whip is a simpler case to explain it people intuitively understand that that salt is impermeable yeah you you show them a piece of salt and say look as long as I stayed dry we strive with respect to fresh water doesn't dissolve nothing gets through it people understand that of Yucca Mountain it's a forest rocks it's obvious water does move through it it's a system that relies on performance of metal over very long periods of time people are suspicious of that and and it's a harder case to make we had a year and a half to get this license application in and we made it it was really good eight thousand page license application with 30 or 40 thousand pages of supporting technical documents a year and a half Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the opportunity to review the application and to the extent that they reviewed it it was spot-on ninety-eight percent you know there are always things but it was a it was an adequate application I'm not saying it was perfect not even saying it was superlative or good adequate and met the requirements of 10 CFR part 63 and that that's what you do you meet those requirements it's a struggle because since Yucca Mountain was suspended in 2010 by congressional action it was defunded and since then the DEA has kept a an R&D program going which in both storage transportation and disposal of spent fuel and high-level waste we're doing generic research on hypothetical sites and the part of the purpose of that is to keep the team ready so if and when hope it's of when not an F we we have national policy well we'll be ready to go the u.s. a big country we have lots of options on geology and so when we have authorization to go ahead and look we'll have a welfare game ready to go underneath whatever whatever type of rock appears to be politically plausible possible go back to the early years on whip when the Sandia team event would be inappropriate not technology wind alerts just astonishingly important oh yeah and he's no scientist first you know I had so he personally left a lasting culture on whip that I'm an heir to and generations beyond me whether they recognize or not that they'll be an heir to the culture he created it that's why I think it's important that we have some continuity we don't need the same people fact it's an obvious that new people will come along and find new ways to solve old problems and that's good but it's that culture of how to put it in context the Sandia does so well with the team of the next generation they get it and and then the cultural thrives nuclear waste management is the type of problem that requires decades to potentially hundreds of years to fully resolve as a consequence an institution like Sandia has been dedicated over at least 50 years to maintaining these capabilities and we anticipate that this kind of skill set will be essential for another equally long period of time [Music] you

Channel: Sandia National Labs

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Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories

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Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020