Objective of the NRC High Level Research Program at BNL

The NRC supports research in the area of high level waste to help provide the information and assessments necessary to license a HLW repository. The criteria used by the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research to identify projects for HLW include: 1. Development of expertise in unfamiliar technologies needed to evaluate the phenomena, mechanisms and uncertainties associated with the NRC and EPA criteria and other issues required in licensing. 2. Development of capabilities needed to audit tests and analyses of DOE work used to demonstrate compliance. 3. Development of regulatory tools (regulation guides, design criteria, standards, technical positions, etc.) needed to understand models and uncertainties and to provide guidance to the DOE on the information needed for compliance assessment. The NRC supports research in the areas of both \"far-field\" and \"near-field\". Compliance with the EPA criterion and the NRC groundwater travel time criterion depend heavily on \"farfield\" properties whereas compliance with the containment and controlled release criteria depend upon \"near-field\" properties. The waste package plays the sole role in compliance with the containment criterion and a major role in determining controlled release from the engineered barrier system. BNL's past and present research programs have involved an evaluation of container failure modes not considered by the DOE in their preliminary waste package designs.