More about Andra sites

 

 

The CSM waste disposal facility

 

The CSM waste disposal facility located in the Manche district is the first repository to be built in France for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste. It was created by a decree issued on 19 June 1969 and authorizing the French Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat à l'énergie atomique – CEA) to modify its facilities at the La Hague Plant by adding a disposal facility for solid radioactive waste.

Its operation was entrusted upon Andra by decree on 24 March 1995. The facility is officially in post-closure monitoring phase since 2003.

 

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The CSFMA waste disposal facility

 

As the CSM waste disposal facility located in the Manche district was planned to be closed, a decree dated September 4 1989 authorized the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA/Andra) to create, within Soulaines-Dhuys and La Ville-aux-Bois municipalities (Aube district), a disposal facility for solid low- and intermediate-level short-lived radioactive waste, the CSFMA.

 

Commissioned in 1992 as a CEA facility, the CSFMA has been officially operated by Andra since a March 24 1995 decree. 

 

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The CSTFA waste disposal facility

 

The prospect of dismantling industrial nuclear facilities, as scheduled in the early 2000s, led the government and the Parliamentary Office for the Selection of Scientific and Technological Options (Office parlementaire d'évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques – OPECST) to require the nuclear industry and Andra to study a specific management system for very-low-level waste. 

Supported by public opinion and environmental associations, the approach led Andra to create the CSTFA, a new facility dedicated to the disposal of very-low-level radioactive waste, as authorized by Order No. 02-3138A of the Prefect of the Aube district, issued on 9 August 2002.

 

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The Meuse/Haute-Marne Centre (CMHM)

 

Andra's major research facility is the Meuse/Haute-Marne Centre with its two components :

 

• the LSMHM Underground Research Laboratory sited at Bure in the Meuse district and aiming at studying the feasibility of the reversible geological disposal of high-level and long-lived intermediate-level radioactive waste in the Callovo-Oxfordian clay formation. This facility was licensed on August 3 1999 and its construction as such (access shafts, basic drift network with underground ventilation) has been achieved in 2006. Nevertheless, more drifts and niches are due to excavated for the on-going geological surveys and experimental programmes or the engineering technological demonstrations. 
  
• Apart from this underground research laboratory, Andra works on the technological and engineering feasibility of geological disposal and has build at Saudron in 2007, in the Haute-Marne district near the LSMHM, a Technological Exhibition Facility (ETe), in order to design and operate prototypes and demonstrators.
  

 

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