Repository Siting and Design and the Levels of Protection Required in Regulation

The safety of geological repositories, and in particular the possibility to show that adequate levels of isolation and containment are provided over the timeframes addressed by safety cases, requires that these systems are robust with respect to the perturbing phenomena and uncertainties that may arise over these time frames. Thus, as far as reasonably possible, events and processes that could be detrimental to isolation and containment, as well as sources of uncertainty that would hamper the evaluation of how the systems evolve over time, are avoided or reduced in magnitude, likelihood or impact. 