The policy of the United States is to dispose of high-level nuclear waste underground in geologic repositories.  The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has been developing plans for a repository to be located at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and intends to submit a license application to the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for that repository in June 2008.
            This paper discusses DOE’s bases for and approach to modeling the localized and general corrosion aspects of the Alloy 22 outer shell of the container that DOE plans to use for encapsulating the waste in the repository.  The modeling is necessary to predict the corrosion behavior for the container’s extraordinarily long “service period” — more than a million years.