ASN Report 2017

146 ASN report on the state of nuclear safety and radiation protection in France in 2017 Chapter 04  - Regulation of nuclear activities and exposure to ionising radiation (water, air, earth, milk, grass, agricultural produce, etc.), more specifically to verify compliance with the hypotheses of the impact assessment and to monitor changes in the radioactivity in the various compartments of the environment around the facilities (see point 4.1.1). An estimation of the doses from BNIs is presented in Table 7. For each site and per year, this table gives the effective doses received by the most exposed reference population groups. The doses from BNIs for a given year are determined on the basis of the actual discharges from each installation for the year in question. This assessment takes account of the discharges through the identified outlets (stack, discharge pipe to river or seawater). It also includes diffuse emissions and sources of radiological exposure to the ionising radiation present in the facilities. These elements are the “source term”. The estimate is made in relation to one or more identified reference groups. These are uniform groups of people (adults, infants, children) receiving the highest average dose out of the entire population exposed to a given installation, following realistic scenarios (taking into account the distance from the site, meteorological data, etc.). All of these parameters, specific to each site, explain most of the differences observed between sites and from one year to another. For each of the nuclear sites presented, the radiological impact remains far below, or at most represents 1% of the limit for the public (1 mSv per year). Therefore in France, the discharges produced by the nuclear industry have an extremely small radiological impact. 4.1.3 Monitoring imposed by the European Union Article 35 of the EURATOM Treaty requires that the Member States establish the facilities needed to carry out continuous monitoring of the level of radioactivity in the air, water and soil and to ensure compliance with the basic standards of health protection for the general public and workers against the hazards of ionising radiation. All Member States, whether or not they have nuclear facilities, are therefore required to implement environmental monitoring arrangements throughout their territory. Article 35 also states that the European Commission may access the monitoring facilities to verify their operation and their effectiveness. During its verifications, the European Commission gives an opinion on the means implemented by the member states to monitor radioactive discharges into the environment and the levels of radioactivity in the environment around nuclear sites and over the national territory. It gives its assessment of the monitoring equipment and methodologies used, and of the organisational setup. Since 1994, the Commission has carried out the following inspections: ཛྷ ཛྷ the La Hague reprocessing plant and the Manche repository of the National Radioactive Waste Management Agency (Andra) in 1996; ཛྷ ཛྷ Chooz NPP in 1999; ཛྷ ཛྷ Belleville-sur-Loire NPP in 1994 and 2003; ཛྷ ཛྷ the La Hague reprocessing plant in 2005; ཛྷ ཛྷ the Pierrelatte nuclear site in 2008; ཛྷ ཛྷ the old uraniummines in the Limousin département in 2010; FOCUS Fifth meeting of the “tritium” action plan follow-up committee in October 2017 Following the publication of the tritium White Paper, ASN set up a tritium action plan follow-up committee in 2010, which it convenes periodically. ASN organised the fifth meeting of this committee on 4th October 2017. Significant advances in metrology were welcomed, such as the publication of a French standard and the development of new methods for measuring tritium traces in the environment. Identification of tritium levels in the environment has also progressed, in particular for the continental atmospheric and aquatic compartments. However, identification of the tritium levels in the soil, plants, biological matrices and living organisms in the marine environment needs to be investigated in greater depth. There are still gaps in our understanding of the behaviour of tritium bound with certain organic molecules, as well as the consequences on tritium transfer to the food chain. In 2017, IRSN published a report on this subject, entitled Updating knowledge acquired on tritium in the environment . During this meeting of the committee, a number of licensees (EDF, CEA, Areva NC) presented the progress made in the work initiated to answer ASN’s requests concerning the characterisation of the physico-chemical forms of tritiated waste. These various studies are in the process of being finalised and some deliverables are still to be transmitted to ASN during the course of 2018. All the documents will then be analysed by ASN. Finally, ASN informed the committee members of the publication on its website of the White Paper (www.asn.fr/sites/tritium/) , the summary of all tritium discharges from BNIs and the corresponding dosimetric impacts declared by the licensees in France for the period 2012-2016. In addition, the ASN Research network produced a data sheet in 2017 on tritium measurements in the environment and the impact of this radionuclide. The recommendations of this sheet, presented to the ASN scientific committee in June 2017, should be taken up in the forthcoming ASN opinion on research. The next meeting of the tritium action plan follow-up committee is scheduled for 2019.