The Clinch River MRS Task Force was appointed in July 1985 by the Roane County Executive and the Oak Ridge City Council to evaluate the Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) facility proposed by the Department of Energy to be constructed in the Roane County portion of Oak Ridge. After several months of study, numerous public meetings, site visits to relevant facilities, and careful evaluation of the integrated MRS concept, it is the considered opinion of the Task Force that the facility could be safely build and operated in Roane County/Oak Ridge.

The Crystalline Repository Project (CRP) of the Department of Energy's Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Program is responsible for identifying sites which could be considered by the Department for construction and operation of the second deep geologic repository for permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste. The CRP is currently evaluating exposed and near surface crystalline rock bodies in three geographic regions in an effort to identify potentially suitable rock bodies for continued evaluations and eventual field investigations.

The Director, Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM), Department of Energy (DOE), has identified the Clinch River Breeder Reactor site, the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Hartsville Nuclear Plant site as preferred and alternative sites, respectively, for development of site-specific designs as part of the proposal for construction of an integrated Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) Facility. The proposal, developed pursuant to Section 141(b) of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, will be submitted to Congress in January 1986.

Repository performance assessment is analysis that identifies events and processes that might affect a repository system for isolation of radioactive waste, examines their effects on barriers to waste migration, and estimates the probabilities of their occurrence and their consequences. In 1983 Battelle Memorial Institute's Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation (ONWI) prepared two plans — one for performance assessment for a waste repository in salt and one for verification and validation of performance assessment technology. At the request of the U.S.

Many nations and international agencies are working to develop improved technology and industrial capability for nuclear fuel cycle and waste management operations. The effort in some countries is limited to research in university laboratories on treating low-level waste from reactor plant operations.

The primary goal of the ongoing LLL program is to develop the technology and data base required to license a nuclear repository in a crystalline rock medium, located at or near the Nevada Test Site (NTS). Our secondary goal is to apply this technology in helping the Department of Energy (DOE) develop repositories in other media and locations.