No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2011
Two potential applications of radioisotope fractionation and decay-series secular disequilibrium in performance assessment for geologic repositories for nuclear waste are preferential radionuclide release in source term analysis and characterization of system closure as a measure of the capacity of the geologic system to isolate waste. A primary mechanism of radioisotope fractionation is selective release and mobility of alpha decay products because of nuclear recoil effects, which is evident in natural system data. Preferential release of radioisotopes from nuclear waste forms or solubility limiting solid phases could affect repository performance; however, consequences of differential radioisotope releases are neglected in performance assessments. Decay-series disequilibria are useful also to characterize open/closedsystem behavior in natural systems. Systems that are closed on time scales that are long relative to the half-lives of decay chain nuclides achieve secular equilibrium characterized by unit activity ratios among series nuclides. For geologic disposal of nuclear waste, measures focused on chemical system closure could capture the essential characteristics of the natural system with respect to radionuclide isolation and could be based quantitatively on uranium and thorium decay series secular equilibria/disequilibria.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.