Yucca Mountain Heater Test Cooling Phase

Yvonne Tsang, Sumit Mukhopadhyay, Jonny Rutqvist, Eric Sonnenthal, and Nicolas Spycher

Contact: Yvonne Tsang, 510/486-7047, ytsang@lbl.gov

Research Objectives
As part of a multilaboratory team, Berkeley Lab is conducting a large-scale in situ thermal test, the Drift Scale Test (DST), in an underground facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, the site for a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository. The test is presently in the second year of the natural cooling phase following four years of heating, during which an approximate heating rate of 185 kW was supplied by nine canister heaters (placed in a drift 47.5 m in length and 5 m in diameter) and fifty 11-meter-long rod heaters installed in boreholes drilled perpendicular to the drift. The heat thus provided set in motion coupled thermal (T), hydrological (H), chemical (C), and mechanical (M) processes of the type that would be generated from heating in the proposed repository during its postclosure period. The objective of this test is to gain an in-depth understanding of THMC coupled processes within fractured welded volcanic tuff situated above the water table.

To continue reading more about this project, view the 1-page pdf here.