The Development of MESHNOTE Code for Radionuclide Migration in the Near Field

not registered; Makino, Hitoshi ; Peter*

MESHNOTE code was developed to evaluate the engineered barrier system in collaboration with QuantiSci. This code is used to simulate glass dissolution, diffusive transport of nuclides in the buffer material and release to surrounding host rock. MESHNOTE is a one-dimensional finite difference, code, which uses cylindrical co-ordinates for the solution of a radially symmetric diffusion problem. MESHNOTE has the followig characteristics: (1) MESHNOTE can solve for diffusive transport of nuclides through an annulus shaped buffer region while accounting for multiple decay chains, linear and non-linear sorption onto the buffer materials and elemental solubility limits; (2) MESHNOTE can solve for ingrowth of plural daughter nuclides from a singular parent nuclide (branching), and the ingrowth of a singular daughter nuclide from plural parent nuclides (rejoining); (3) MESHNOTE can treat the leaching of nuclide from the vitrified waste and the release of nuclide from buffer to surrounding rock, which are boundary conditions for migration in the buffer, basing on the phenomena; (4) MESHNOTE can treat principal parameters (e.g. solubility and distribution coefficient) relevant to nuclide migration as time and space-dependence parameters; (5) The time stepping scheme in MESHNOTE is controlled by tolerance defined by the user. The time stepping will increase automatically while checking the accuracy of the numerical solution. The conceptual model, the mathematical model and the numerical implementation of the MESHNOTE code are described in this report and the characteristic functions of MESHNOTE are verified by comparing with analytical solutions or simulations produced with other calculation codes.