A nuclear owner/operator perspective on ways and means for joint programming on predisposal activities

Abstract

Nuclear decommissioning is a worldwide competitive market. It is also the main source of radioactive waste from the nuclear energy field. In order to reduce the waste volume it is necessary to sort the actual radioactive waste to be disposed of and to separate them from other materials that could be recycled. Since 2015, Electricité de France (EDF) has gathered the waste management and dismantling (WM&D) projects, the related competences and human resources in the WM&D field, in a dedicated directorate (DP2D) and a company group called Cyclife (including waste treatment facilities). Taking into account the experience gained by carrying out its own WM&D projects as well as contributing to international cooperation, EDF considers that integrating collaborative research and development (R&D) on pre-disposal and waste management could be carried out following four main objectives: (1) alignment of the application of regulatory frameworks through appropriate definition of criteria and rules for radioactive waste to enable sensible worldwide comparison of technics; (2) improvement of technical and organisational aspects of nuclear reactors decommissioning using a demonstrator facility to be in operation, at first for graphite reactors, by 2022; (3) development of new techniques to decontaminate/homogenize metallic materials through a dedicated recycling route. These technics will be implemented in a new treatment facility foreseen to be available by 2030; and (4) increased training of decommissioning operators with the help of new technologies. All these improvements are aiming, beyond technical and experimental aspects, at reducing environmental impacts of nuclear activities as well as preserving the radioactive disposal volumes, as they are considered by EDF as rare resources.