Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) investigates approaches for managing used nuclear fuel (high level waste) in Canada. All countries that produce nuclear energy are actively exploring plans to secure this waste for the long term and underground deep geological repositories (DGR) are the universally preferred option. NWMO has long been a key supporter of fundamental and applied institutional research regarding the mechanical evolution of excavation induced damage zones (EDZ) including crucial enhancements to rock mechanics testing protocols and techniques, monitoring approaches at numerous scales, development of new simulation tools, and the improvement of predictive tools for all stages of damage evolution. This collaborative research is essential as the requirements placed on our ability to forecast the rock mass thermal-hydro-mechanical (THM) response containing these repositories far exceed traditional design expectations for underground infrastructure and mandate the development of new tools and understanding. The results from this work will be used to advance our ability to address many of the long-term issues associated with nuclear waste repositories and establish protocols and damage management strategies for underground design of deep repositories. The focus of this work is to advance and integrate protocols and tools for site investigation, sample selection, mechanical testing and advanced continuum/ discontinuum hybrid analysis of rock to more accurately simulate EDZ mechanics at all scales from the crystalline, laboratory sample and full repository scales. THM coupling is a complex issue for low porosity sedimentary rocks and poly-crystalline igneous rocks, the two primary geological environments being considered for high level waste repositories in Canada. Related to all of these issues is the role of water and saturation levels within non-connected poorly drained pore spaces within these solids. All of these complications to fundamental mechanics and associated secondary effects including temporal changes over the ultra-long term design life of an underground repository will be studied in this project. 7 MSc's, 6PhD's and 1 research assistant will be funded by this project.