12-29-2017, 10:30 AM
You got our attention Jan with your mention of Yucca Mountain. Two of us here at EOU worked with Lawrence Livermore on that project some years ago. Our Job? To measure how much the rock at the mountain, under extreme heat/pressure, could expand before it cracked. We built the instrumentation and tested it at the site but the Livermore boys set it up so I never did actually go inside the repository. I know that the site was selected, in part, due to the scarcity of both surface and groundwater in the area. This is all likely neither here nor there because the NRC study probably wasn't actually carried out inside the mountain but rather, duplicated the conditions inside the mountain. In any case, don't you think that at 250C it would be a pretty dry atmospheric environment and hence, not conducive to the formation of rust/oxidation? As you may know Jan, like Arizona, decaying radioactive material is a dry heat.
I do know, however, that the contingency plan for an overheated storage compartment was to flood the compartment with water so perhaps the NRC study contemplated this possibility.
I do know, however, that the contingency plan for an overheated storage compartment was to flood the compartment with water so perhaps the NRC study contemplated this possibility.