Acknowledgements

The work presented in this thesis was carried out at Vectura Consulting AB during the spring of 2013 as a master’s thesis at the division of GeoEngineering at Chalmers University of Technology. It has been supervised by Lisa Hernqvist with assisting supervision by Johan Funehag. The examiner of the thesis is Lars-Olof Dahlström. Financial support for the work was provided by Vectura Consulting AB, BeFo and Per Tengborg (Rock Engineering Research Foundation) and Trafikverket (Swedish Transport Administration).
First of all we would like to thank our supervisor Lisa Hernqvist for her valuable guidance throughout the work and for always being there to support us. Many thanks also to Lars-Olof Dahlström and Johan Funehag, for their support of information and ideas of how to develop the work.
We want to express our gratitude to Thomas Dalmalm (Trafikverket) and Håkan Stille (Professor emeritus, KTH Royal Institute of Technology) for feedback, Mansueto Morosini (SKB, Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co) for guiding us at ÄSPÖ Hard Rock Laboratory and to Henry Ahokas (Pöyry) for helping us with questions about the data used.
We want to thank Posiva and especially Jere Lahdenpera for providing us with data and Trafikverket, BeFo and Vectura Consulting AB for the financial support.
Thanks also to Kartik Suresh and Mahamed Tohow for good collaboration during the field study conducted.
Finally we want to thank our friends and family for their never-ending support and encouragement.

Göteborg, May 2013
Víðir Einarsson and Anna Höglund