Mma. Ananda, RELIABILITY MODELING OF ENGINEERED BARRIER SYSTEMS FOR NUCLEAR WASTE - A CONDITIONAL APPROACH, Microelectronics and reliability, 34(7), 1994, pp. 1221-1225
The lifetime of the Engineered Barrier System (EBS) used for containme
nt of high-level radioactive waste will play an important role in cont
rolling the cumulative release of radionuclides from a geological repo
sitory. Essentially, an EBS has two major components: a metal barrier
and the waste form (cladding). Since any suitable site is above the st
atic water table, the decay heat generated from this waste is expected
to keep the surface temperature of a canister above the boiling point
of water for a T random time period. Assuming the Weibull life-time d
istribution on each component, we use the conditional approach to deri
ve the lifetime distribution of the EBS. In our model, the oxidization
process of the metal barrier (i.e. the lifetime of the metal barrier)
starts after this time T and the lifetime of the cladding starts afte
r the lifetime of the metal barrier.