EURAD

European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management

EURAD scheme
EURAD is the largest European research program in nuclear geosciences within the EU Horizon 2020 framework. It comprises 52 partners with a total budget of 59.9 ME (including a 50% co-funding by the partner institutions).

Short project description: Following decades of research, development and demonstration (RD&D) in support of the safe management and disposal of radioactive waste, and building on the preparatory work of the recent EC JOPRAD project, a European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management (EURAD) is now established to coordinate activities on agreed priorities of common interest between European Waste Management Organisations (WMOs), Technical Support Organisations (TSOs) and Research Entities (REs).

UFZ is involved in three EURAD work packages:

  • WP2 ACED (Assessment of Chemical Evolution of ILW and HLW Disposal Cells): We will bring in our expertise in reactive transport modelling (RTM). The main target is to further improve the OGS-RTM capacities and applications to experimental analysis. UFZ ist SubTask leader (SubT 4.1 Conceptual and mathematical formulation for a mechanistic based reactive transport model for chemical evolution at the disposal cell scale).
  • WP4 DONUT (Development and Improvement Of Numerical methods and Tools for modelling coupled processes): The primary goal is to further develop OGS capabilities for multiscale modelling of fracturing processes mainly by the variational phase field method. The focus is on methods, benchmarking and computational efficiency. UFZ is Task leader (T3 Scale transition schemes for coupled processes).
  • WP6 GAS (Mechanistic understanding of gas transport in clay materials): The key part is understanding and predictability of gas migration in different host rocks, in particular path way generation and self-healing processes with close links to lab and field experiments. UFZ ist SubTask leader (SubT 3.3 Model-based interpretation and synthesis of results).

UFZ/TUBAF’s EURAD team consists of Vanessa Montoya, Renchao Lu, Haibing Shao, Keita Yoshioka, Mostafa Mollaali, Norbert Grunwald, Wenqing Wang, Thomas Nagel, Olaf Kolditz

Project duration: 06/2019 – 05/2024

Project funding: The funding by the European Commission under Grant Agreement number 847593 is highly acknowledged. Project work is co-funded by the Helmholtz Program Oriented Research (POF IV) with the Program “Changing Earth – Sustaining our Future” Topic 8 “Georesources for the Energy Transition and a High-Tech Society”. The project budget is 436kE (including 240kE EU funding). UFZ is a linked third party of FZJ.

Work group links (including more details):

Web links: EURAD’s webpage. Project management is supported by projectplace