Cementitious Barriers Partnership (CBP) Phase I Code Integration - 11446

The Cementitious Barriers Partnership (CBP) Project is a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration supported by the United States Department of Energy (US DOE) Office of Waste Processing. The objective of the CBP project is to develop a set of integrated tools to improve understanding and prediction of the longterm structural, hydraulic, and chemical performance of cementitious barriers used in nuclear applications. The tools developed under this project have been used to evaluate and predict the behavior of cementitious barriers used in near-surface engineered waste disposal systems, e.g., waste forms, containment structures, entombments, and environmental remediation, including decontamination and decommissioning analysis of structural concrete components of nuclear facilities. The periods of cementitious performance being evaluated are up to or longer than 100 years for operating facilities and longer than 1000 years for waste management. The CBP project is focused on reducing the uncertainties of current methodologies for assessing cementitious barrier performance and increasing the consistency and transparency of the assessment process. Prediction uncertainties are reduced when appropriate models are coupled over relevant spatial and temporal scales. Stateof-the-art models were identified that provide predictions of barrier performance over well-defined regimes that represent critical areas of interest. In Phase I of the CBP code integration, these models have been linked to a GoldSim model to better characterize model prediction uncertainties and to provide the first necessary step to coupling the models over relevant spatial and temporal solution domains to provide much more accurate predictions of barrier performance over the relevant periods of performance. The GoldSim model also provides a common graphical user interface to the underlying external codes. Ultimately, the results of this project will enable improved risk-informed, performance-based decision-making and support several of the strategic initiatives in the DOE Office of Environmental Management Engineering & Technology Roadmap.