Application of Spent Fuel Characterization and Leaching Studies for Validating Alteration Models

From the Spanish point of view, one of the key issues related to the HLW performance assessment is knowing and predicting, or modelling, the behaviour of spent fuel under geological repository conditions. Taking into account this objective, several experiments have been performed in order to split and determine the influence of different variables on the final stability of the spent fuel matrix in the geological repository. This paper presents some of the leaching results obtained with spent fuel and chemical analogues (UO₂, alpha doped – UO₂, SIMFUEL,) their application to extrapolate the corrosion behaviour for a long period of time and compare with corresponding data obtained using models. This procedure allows pointing out some of the uncertainties whose minimization is necessary to improve the models useful for performance assessment studies.