Overview of nuclear waste management in France
“French policy is that we should not leave the burden of our (nuclear) waste to future generations: this means that we have an obligation today to develop a solution to definitively and actively protect them from the dangers of the waste,” said Jean-Michel Hoorelbecke, deputy head of safety at the French National Agency for Radioactive Waste (ANDRA), the government body in charge of managing nuclear waste.
France has one of the largest nuclear power plants in the world, second only to the US.
The cheap and abundant energy produced by these assets provides 75% of the country’s electricity supply and has made France one of the world’s largest net exporters of electricity.
In addition to energy, however, this fleet is also responsible for the production of a significant amount of spent fuel and radioactive waste. Although there are well-known protocols, the management of radioactive waste remains a conundrum: cooling spent fuel takes an excessive amount of time and there is no known, long-term solution for its disposal.
As part of the ongoing monitoring of radioactive waste, as required by the European Directive on the Safe Management of Nuclear Fuels and Waste, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Integrated Review Service for Radioactive Waste and Spent Fuel Management, Decommissioning and Remediation (ARTEMIS) completed an 11-day mission in January to provide an independent assessment and advice on the management of spent radioactive nuclear fuel in the country.
The assessment covered the processing and management of all types of waste, including low- and high-level radioactive waste and long-lived spent fuel.
The assessors concluded that ANDRA demonstrated “a comprehensive commitment to safety with a responsible approach to the management of radioactive waste and spent fuel” and that there were only a few suggestions for improvement.
One of the recommendations was to facilitate the implementation of the requirement that decommissioning should take place as soon as possible.
Safety comes first with nuclear waste
Most of the fuel that comes out of nuclear reactors in France is reprocessed. However, because of the extreme heat, the fuel must first be cooled for several years in four-metre-deep ‘pools’ of water.
This process produces waste of medium and high radioactivity.
The latter, also known as long-lived waste, is vitrified. This generates immense heat and requires the spent fuel to be cooled for decades before it can be permanently stored and disposed of. Intermediate-level waste follows a similar treatment process.
Low-level radioactive waste and short-lived waste can remain in surface disposal facilities and be disposed of relatively quickly after generation.
In October, Greenpeace raised concerns that EDF and Areva’s spent fuel pools could be vulnerable to attack in a report prepared by industry experts. The report said the pools, which typically contain the equivalent of one to three nuclear reactor cores, would not be able to withstand external aggression and could suffer a catastrophic loss of cooling.
However, Areva refuted the claim, saying that most of the fuel had already cooled significantly and that the company is vigilant about the threat of terrorist attacks.
Finding the right solution
After decades of cooling, France, like most other nuclear power generating countries, still has no long-term solution for the storage of high- and medium-consumed nuclear waste.
There is no rush for the time being, because Hoorelbecke says that the storage of the current high-level radioactive waste will not take place until around 2080, more than five to eight decades after reprocessing.
However, developing a long-term strategy for the phase-out of nuclear power in France, as in the US, was a lengthy and difficult, but also democratic, process.
In 1991, the country passed the Waste Management Act, which established ANDRA. The act provided for three areas of research for spent fuel that cannot be accommodated at the surface facility, namely medium- and long-lived wastes.
The areas of research include geological disposal, long-term surface storage and partitioning transmutation – a process aimed at separating and recycling actinides, including minor actinides (radioactive metallic elements based on actinium).
For research purposes, ANDRA built a 500-meter-deep underground geological laboratory without waste, to test the extent to which the rock can contain waste and is resistant to disturbances.
After the investigation was completed in 2005 and independently reviewed, the French safety authority, l’Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, said that geological disposal was the safest option in the long term. A year of public debate followed, and in 2006 the French parliament voted to launch an industrial program for geological disposal of nuclear waste.
Future-proof nuclear power plants
The national decision led to the creation of a plan for a €25 billion, 500 m underground rock laboratory in eastern France, located in clay and known as the Industrial Centre for Geological Storage (Cigéo). The structure will consist of hundreds of storage tunnels with a total surface area of 25 km2 and will last a century.
The figure of €25 billion is significant and is only an estimate at this stage.
“It is very difficult to make a cost estimate of an industrial facility over such a long period,” says Hoorelbecke. “The waste producers are obliged to make financial provisions for this project that has to be financed over 100 years and therefore the government had to set an amount for these provisions; the €25 billion is for the construction, the operation and the closure of the facility.”
According to Hoorelbecke, construction can begin within a few years if the permit is granted.
One of the most important factors of the provision is that it must be reversible.
“This is based on a very progressive process,” says Hoorelbecke. “It is clear that reversibility is needed, because we are making provisions for a very long period of time and things can change in the future.”
For example, research is being done into petition and transmutation, with the aim of converting long-lived waste into short-lived waste or possibly reducing the radioactivity of the waste.
But today, according to Hoorelbecke, this is impossible on an industrial scale and no one wants a policy of ‘wait and see’.
Loaded public opinions
However, not everyone is in favor of the proposed geological facility, and the issue is highly contentious in France. There have been a number of protests at the site of the facility this year, with arrests made and police evicting 15 protesters who were living in a treehouse.
“People are against the plant because they want to fight nuclear energy,” says Hoorelbecke. “We have this burden to bear and we should not leave it for future generations, whether you are for or against nuclear energy, it does not matter: we have this waste and we have to deal with it now.”
He adds that even if petitions and transmutations were to work in the future, Cigéo would still be needed for the current waste.
As in the US, where there has been much talk of a long-term facility at Yucca Mountain, the legacy of nuclear power is a difficult one. Fukushima showed the world some of the devastating potential if it all goes wrong. But as the IAEA report shows, nuclear power is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world and is likely to remain so.
Staying ahead of emerging threats should be a priority, as should developing the best technologically sound removal solution, as the industry is trying to do.
“Nuclear waste management in France: the long and short term” was originally created and published by Energy technologya brand of GlobalData.
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