Understanding the creep behavior of bentonite-sand mixtures as buffer materials in a low-level radioactive waste repository in Taiwan

This study investigates the creep behavior of bentonite-sand mixtures as potential buffer materials for low-level radioactive waste (LLW) repositories, with a specific case study in Taiwan. To assess the long-term hydro-mechanical properties, constant-volume swelling pressure, hydraulic conductivity, strain-controlled shear, and stress-controlled shear tests were conducted on MX80 and KV1 bentonite-sand mixtures. The experimental results indicate that MX80-sand 70/30 mixtures are prioritized as the buffer materials with 2.10 MPa swelling pressure and 1 × 10⁻¹³ m/s hydraulic conductivity. However, the shear strength of mixtures was reduced by almost 50 % when fully saturated. Furthermore, this study proposed a novel stress-controlled direct shear apparatus to retrieve the creep model parameters. The numerical method based on the creep model efficiently supports and simulates the saturation process and creep displacement. The finite element method (FEM) result predicts that the buffer of both bentonite-sand mixtures will achieve an average degree of saturation of 95 % at the end of three decades and full saturation in 100 years. The simulated creep displacement results at key nodes suggest that both top and bottom parts in the buffer, assembled from MX80-sand 70/30 mixtures or KV1-sand 70/30 mixtures, will have almost equivalent values of 4 mm in the horizontal and 2 mm in the vertical directions eventually.