The safety of repositories for highly radioactive wastes

Many authors have studied the safety of disposal of highly radioactive wastes in excavated cavities beneath the earth. Work has been concentrated in three areas: prediction of future events and processes which could affect waste containment, mathematical modeling of failure scenarios, and estimation of uncertainties in model predictions. The results of past safety assessments are reviewed and compared in this paper. Anything but a very small release of radioactivity from a repository would appear to be quite unlikely; a quantitative evaluation of the probabilities of small releases has not proved possible.