Description

The land areas where the water table is at or near the surface and the processes affecting their potential evolution.

Category

Categorisation as a Feature, Event and/or Process.

  • Features are physical components of the disposal system and environment being assessed. Examples include waste packaging, backfill, surface soils. Features typically interact with one another via processes and in some cases events.
  • Events are dynamic interactions among features that occur over time periods that are short compared to the safety assessment timeframe such as a gas explosion or meteorite impact.
  • "Processes" are issues or dynamic interactions among features that generally occur over a significant proportion of the safety assessment timeframe and may occur over the whole of this timeframe. Events and processes may be coupled to one another (i.e. may influence one another).

The classification of a FEP as an event or process depends upon the assessment context, because the classification is undertaken with reference to an assessment timeframe. In this generic IFEP List, many IFEPs are classified as both Events and Processes; users will need to decide which of these classifications is relevant to their context and its timeframes.

  • Feature
  • Process

Comments

The “Comments” field, when present, contains any additional explanation of the IFEP, beyond that implicit in the FEP's description and provided in the “Relevance to Performance and Safety” field. This additional explanation may include, where appropriate, the IFEPs characteristics, the circumstances under which it might be relevant and its relationship to other (especially similar) IFEPs.

Wetlands (including marshes, fens and peat bogs) may be underlain by, or lead to formation of, thick deposits of organic material (e.g. peat). Wetlands may also be drained to provide agricultural land and excavated for peat which is then used as a fuel or soil supplement (FEP 1.4.8).

Relevance to Performance and Safety

The “Relevance to Performance and Safety” field contains an explanation of how the IFEP might influence the performance and safety of the disposal system under consideration through its impact on the evolution of the repository system and on the release, migration and/or uptake of repository-derived contaminants.

Contaminants that might have migrated from the repository may be contained in the water, and the peat, found in wetlands. Contaminated peat may be used as fertiliser or drained to provide agricultural land, leading to indirect exposure to humans via uptake into crops or livestock. Peat may also be used as fuel, leading to exposure via inhalation. Further, both humans and non-human biota can be subject to external exposure as a result of time spent in wetlands, and internal exposure via indirect ingestion of wetland soil, and foods growing or grazing in the wetland environment.

2000 List

A reference to the related FEP(s) within the 2000 NEA IFEP List.

2.3.04