Events & Courses

Providing safe, permanent disposal of legacy and future higher activity radioactive waste is essential. Deep burial of waste in a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) is the internationally recognised preferred way forward.

Delivering a GDF requires input from a range of expertise, including geoscientific, environmental, social scientific, and engineering disciplines:

• to develop an understanding of the surface, near-surface and deeper geological history – the pre-disposal ‘baseline’ conditions at any proposed site;
• to understand (through surface-based investigations, natural analogue studies, modelling and experimentation) how the sub-surface environment may respond to GDF construction and waste emplacement; and
• to understand how the disposal system (engineered barriers, host and surrounding geology, surface environment) may evolve on a timescale that could extend to one million years in the future. 

This conference welcomes contributions relevant to the geological disposal of radioactive waste. It will seek to encourage links between geoscience, environmental sciences, social sciences and engineering, in the context of international progress in the development of GDFs. Case histories, ongoing collaborative work and planned activities to enhance the state-of-the-art will be considered. Opportunities for closer working of various technical communities in relation to geological disposal will be discussed and promoted as appropriate.