Observations and predictions of hydromechanical coupling effects in the Boom clay, Mol Underground Research Laboratory, Belgium

The Boom clay is considered as a candidate host rock for the Belgian disposal of radioactive waste. Thanks to the recent sinking of a new shaft to extend the Underground Research Laboratory (URL) at the Mol site, new in-situ data have been obtained. They consist in the observation of significant fracturing, evidenced during the excavation of the shaft annexes, and in correlated hydraulic perturbations in the far field (maximum of 0.2 MPa at 60-m radius). These observations cannot be explained from simple poroplastic models that predict a maximum perturbation extent of 25 m under full deconfinement. Thus, models with increasing complexity are built to explain this discrepancy. It is proposed that the low-support pressure imposed by the primary lining, combined with the long time over which this support condition held, has favoured the decompression of the clay massif through time-dependent effects, mainly skeleton viscosity. This resulted in near-field fracturing, leading to an apparent increase of the excavated radius and to a hydraulic perturbation in the far field. This interpretation still needs to be validated/invalidated with future research. The effect on the overall performance of the repository is expected to remain small due to the self-healing nature of the fractures.