Parameteric uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for the integrated safety assessment of radioactive waste repository

Abstract

An integrated model is developed in this paper for the performance assessment of high level radioactive waste repository. This integrated model consists of two simple mathematical models. The one is a geosphere model based on constant failure rates and a multiple-barrier system to provide source terms to biosphere. The other is a biosphere model which has multiple pathways for radionuclides to reach to human. For the parametric uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for the risk assessment of high level radioactive waste repository, Latin hypercube sampling and rank correlation techniques are applied to this model. The former is cost-effective for large computer programs because it gives smaller error in estimating output distribution even with smaller number of runs compared to crude Monte Carlo technique. The latter is good for generating dependence structure between samples of input parameters. It is also used to find out the most sensitive, or important, parameter groups between given input parameters. The methodology of the mathematical modelling with statistical analysis will provide useful insights to the decision-making of radioactive waste repository selection and future research area related to uncertain and sensitive input parameters.