3. Long-term safety assessment after the closure phase

3.1 Long-term safety assessment steps

Storage safety is specific in that it is very long-term and must therefore be passive as soon as possible after closure. It is not based on monitoring and control systems that cannot be guaranteed over the long term. This implies a mastery of technological solutions to make the repository as robust as possible to internal events (component failures) and external events (man-made intrusions, natural events) occurring on timescales of more than a thousand years. To achieve this, safety analysis is integrated right from the design stage.

Based on the description of the facilities and the scientific knowledge acquired, the safety analysis is based on an understanding of the evolution of storage behavior over time, expressed...