Cost-Effective Cementitious Material Compatible with Yucca Mountain Repository Geochemistry

The current plans for the Yucca Mountain (YM) repository project (YMP) use steel structures to stabilize the disposal drifts and connecting tunnels that are collectively over 100 kilometers in length. The potential exist to reduce the underground construction cost by 100s of millions of dollars and improve the repository's performance. These economic and engineering goals can be achieved by using the appropriate cementitious materials to build out these tunnels. This report describes the required properties of YM compatible cements and reviews the literature that proves the efficacy of this approach. This report also describes a comprehensive program to develop and test materials for a suite of underground construction technologies