Cost estimation of the canisters for an HLW repository in Korea

This study provides the estimated costs for the canisters of PWR and CANDU spent fuels based on an industrial engineering method and the account classification method. Ceteris paribus, it is found that approximately 13% of the unit manufacturing cost based oil an industrial engineering estimation was cheaper than that of the account classification method. The unit manufacturing cost of a PWR canister was estimated to be 163,586 EUR by using an industrial engineering estimation. According to the conceptual Korean reference design, for the PWR, 11,375 canisters and for the CANDU, 2835 canisters will be needed to dispose of the spent fuels of 36,000 tU, so the manufacturing costs of the canisters would be about 32% of the total disposal cost. Hence, the manufacturing cost of the canisters for spent fuels is the most dominant cost driver for the overall disposal costs. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.