Final thoughts: The fragile connection of safety and science in the geological disposal of radioactive waste

While research on the safety of geological disposal of radioactive waste has been ongoing for more than 50 years, the research community has not achieved a clear understanding of repository safety. Repository safety is often considered a concept developed by safety engineers, putting ever-growing knowledge in the overall context of a safety case, with scientists providing building blocks for it, some of which might not contribute to safety. This article argues that scientists need to increase their overall understanding of repository safety and in particular of the redundancy of various barriers assuring the isolation capacity of a repository over an unprecedented long time.