Demands placed on waste package performance testing and modeling by some general results on reliability analysis

Waste packages for a US nuclear waste repository are required to provide reasonable assurance of maintaining substantially complete containment of radionuclides for 300 to 1000 years after closure. The waiting time to failure for complex failure processes affecting engineered or manufactured systems is often found to be an exponentially-distributed random variable. Assuming that this simple distribution can be used to describe the behavior of a hypothetical single barrier waste package, calculations presented in this paper show that the mean time to failure (the only parameter needed to completely specify an exponential distribution) would have to be more than 10{sub 7} years in order to provide reasonable assurance of meeting this requirement. With two independent barriers, each would need to have a mean time to failure of only 10{sup 5} years to provide the same reliability. Other examples illustrate how multiple barriers can provide a strategy for not only achieving but demonstrating regulatory compliance.