The Role of Actinides in a Performance Assessment of a Nuclear Waste Repository. SKB’s Supporting Actinide Research.

After a few hundred years, the actinides will dominate the radiotoxicity of spent nuclear fuel. This does not necessarily mean that the actinides will dominate the dose to organisms at the surface above a geologic repository. Quite the contrary, in most performance assessments this dose is dominated by long-lived fission products, activation products and, in the very long perspective, actinide daughters. This makes the far-field migration properties of the actinides less interesting for further research. There are, however, other aspects of the presence of actinides in spent nuclear fuel and some of these and SKB’s research in these fields is presented and discussed here.