radioactive waste management
The agency manages, operates and monitors radioactive waste disposal centres, it designs and builds new centres for waste that cannot be handled by existing facilities.
It defines specifications for the conditioning, acceptance and disposal of radioactive waste, in compliance with applicable safety rules, the use of radioactivity generates radioactive waste, classified according to two criteria.
radioactive waste management
The intensity of radioactivity, which determines the levels of protection required to manage the waste effectively, the ''''lifetime'''' of most of the radioelements present, defining how long the waste will remain potentially harmful, each type of waste calls for specific management.
The aim of long-term radioactive waste management is to protect human health and the environment against any emission or dissemination of radioactive materials, waste repository concepts adapted to each type of waste must isolate radioactive materials from the environment until their radioactivity has decayed to an acceptable level.
This implies perfectly controlled management of radioactive waste, from production through conditioning to final disposal, the Manche waste disposal facility.
The french National Radiactive Waste Management Agency is responsible for the long-term management of all radioactive watse in France and for the conduct of investigations on its disposal in deep geological formation.
After 25 years of service and with 527 214 m3 of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste, the Manche waste disposal facility has allowed Andra to define a waste repository concept that is recognised throughout the world, starting out as a simple in-trench disposal site, the Manche facility saw rapid development.
Today, it is covered by a leaktight cover designed chiefly to prevent water from flowing on the waste packages, the end of the operational phase does not mean the end of the facility.
In January 2003, it officially entered its monitoring phase and will be placed under particularly active surveillance for 10 years, since 1994, short-lived, low- and intermediate-level waste has been sent to the Aube waste disposal facility, which inherits the 25 years of experience acquired by its predecessor, studies on disposal projects for radium-bearing and graphite waste The management for radium-bearing and graphite waste is currently at the investigation stage and constitutes an activity pertaining to the research mission of the Agency.
Resulting from the past uses of radioactivity, mostly between the beginning of the 20th century and the 1970s, and also from the remediation of old sites, the waste referred to under the general designation of radium-bearing waste contain a large concentration of radium, no specific management system has yet been defined for that type of waste since no dedicated disposal facility is available.
The so-called graphite waste encompass the different elements generated by the dismantling of gas-graphite reactors GGR implemented by the CEA and EDF from the 1950s to the 1980s, they include mostly.
radioactivity types
piles of graphite-column assemblies with generally hexagonal sections; those piles were surrounded by reflector columns ; sheaths consisting of cylindrical graphite shields laid out around the fuel element, pile of graphite blocks at Chinon EDF The GGR reactors are all out of service and their fuel elements have been unloaded.
However, pile-ups and reflectors are still present in the reactors, while the sheaths have already been stored at the different operators EDF, CEA or COGEMA, those elements contain carbon 14 and chlorine 36, for example, the latter produced by the activation of impurities.
