ASN Report 2017

445 ASN report on the state of nuclear safety and radiation protection in France in 2017 Chapter 16  - Radioactive waste and contaminated sites and soils Storage facilities are nevertheless indispensable pending commissioning of the deep geological disposal facility, to allow the cooling of certain types of waste and then to accompany the industrial operation of the disposal facility, which will develop in stages. Furthermore, if operations to remove emplaced packages were to be decided on in the context of the reversibility of the repository, storage facilities would be needed. Reception of the first radioactive waste packages for deep geological disposal is now planned for around 2030. The Act of 28th June 2006 tasked Andra with coordinating the research and studies on the storage of HL and ILW-LL waste, which are therefore part of the approach of complementarity with the reversible repository. The law stipulated more specifically that the research and studies on storage should, by 2015 at the latest, allow new storage facilities to be created or existing facilities to be modified to meet the needs identified by the PNGMDR, particularly in terms of capacity and duration. The progress made In early 2013 Andra submitted a report on all the research and studies carried out. This report more particularly presented a survey of future storage needs, the exploration of the complementarity between storage and disposal, studies and research on engineering and on the phenomenological behaviour of the warehouses and a review of innovative technical options. From 2013 to 2015, Andra conducted more in-depth studies into storage concepts linked to repository reversibility. This concerns hypothetical future installations which, if necessary, would accept packages removed from the repository. For such installations, Andra looked for versatility which would allow simultaneous or successive storage of packages of various types in their primary form or placed in a disposal overpack. In its study submitted in 2013, Andra states that it has ceased research on near-surface storage facilities owing more specifically to the greater complexity – linked in particular to the management of groundwater and ventilation in the case of exothermal waste – of civil engineering monitoring (limited accessibility to the outer surface of the structures in contact with the rock) and reduced operational flexibility. On the basis of the results of research and studies, Andra issued recommendations in 2014 for the design of future installations to complement disposal. These recommendations are also based on industrial experience feedback and the continued research on the durability of materials and on monitoring and surveillance systems. They focus in particular on the measures that foster the durability of the facilities (up to one hundred years or so), their monitoring, and the modularity of the future warehouses, allowing additional modules to be added to a storage facility while it continues to operate. Jointly with Andra, Areva has integrated certain advances into the design of the extension of the HLW waste storage facility on the La Hague site, commissioned in 2013. This enables a longer operating life to be envisaged for this facility. Within the framework of the PNGMDR 2013-2015, and after presenting the inventory of HLW and ILW-LL waste packages intended for Cigéo as at the end of 2013 and the status of the existing storage locations, the producers more specifically analysed the core elements enabling waste package storage needs to be identified. In its opinion  2016-AV-0259 of 25th February 2016 concerning the studies on the management of high-level and intermediate-level long-lived waste (HL and ILW-LL) submitted in application of the PNGMDR 2013-2015, with a view to preparing the PNGMDR 2016-2018, ASN considers that the producers of HL and ILW-LL waste must supplement the study carried out under the PNGMDR 2013-2015 and define the following for each family of HL and ILW-LL waste: ཛྷ ཛྷ the existing storage capacities, specifying their availability; ཛྷ ཛྷ the forecasts for these filling to capacity or the obsolescence of these storage facilities and the needs for new storage capacity, some of which are already confirmed, for the next twenty years ; ཛྷ ཛྷ the time needed to commission new storage capacity. The sensitivity of the storage needs to shifts in the Cigéo project development schedule must be analysed in order to identify any threshold effects with regard to future storage needs or extensions to the operating time of existing storage facilities. This analysis must be based on the assumptions used by the licensees for the decommissioning of their installations over the next twenty years. ASN recommends that the PNGMDR should, after identifying the foreseeable needs for storage facilities, set the time frames associated with the key stages in the procedures for their creation and commissioning. In the abovementioned opinion, ASN considers that at the present stage, generic studies into storage concepts complementary to disposal will provide no further significant advances. Studies could be carried out in the future as part of the licensee-led storage facility projects. ASN considers the following to be necessary. ཛྷ ཛྷ The licensees must take the recommendations given in the PNGMDR 2016-2018: into account in the design of new storage facilities, and, insofar as possible, in the periodic safety review of existing facilities. ཛྷ ཛྷ Andra is studying the management of degraded primary packages of ILW-LL waste, which could have been removed from the repository, in particular concerning the dimensioning of the means for repackaging degraded primary packages in the Cigéo surface installations. ཛྷ ཛྷ Andra must specify the technical elements on which it based its decision to definitively abandon the near-surface storage facilities design option, as the document submitted by Andra contains insufficient technical details to rule on the appropriateness of the abandonment decision.