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A Geological Repository is an engineered underground containment facility or ‘geological disposal facility’, which is designed in such a way that natural and man-made barriers work together to prevent and/or minimise the escape of radioactivity. It is inevitable that some radioactivity from the facility will eventually reach the surface. But the disposal facility is designed to ensure that this will not happen for many thousands of years, and even then only in quantities that are insignificant compared to the levels of radioactivity all around us in the environment from natural background sources. At this early stage in the process it is not possible to specify exactly what a geological disposal facility will look like. The detailed layout and design of the basic geological disposal facility, both above and below ground, will be tailored to the waste inventory for disposal and the geography and specific geological characteristics at the site in question. The dimensions of the underground areas of a geological disposal facility will be determined by the exact inventory for disposal, the properties of the host rock and the geometry of features within it. Nevertheless indicative geological disposal facility dimensions have been estimated for an inventory similar to the ‘CoRWM baseline’. Those estimates indicate that the underground area of host rock required (i.e. the ‘footprint’) for an Intermediate level waste/low level waste disposal facility would be of the order of 1km², and for a HLW and spent fuel disposal facility (assuming that the latter were treated as a waste) would be of the order of 3km². In practice it may be possible to build a geological disposal facility over a smaller area, by building deposition tunnels or vaults on different levels. This would however depend on the geology of the site.