ASME Message

Abstracts
particular emphasis on the management of long-lived waste and spent fuel and on decommissioning of disused nuclear
facilities. The programme of work in the area of radioactive waste management is supervised by the Radioactive Waste
Management Committee (RWMC) made of senior representatives from regulatory authorities, radioactive waste
management and decommissioning organisations, policy making bodies, and research-and-development institutions from
the NEA countries. The IAEA participates in the work of the committee, and the European Commission (EC) is a full
member. Strong ties are maintained with national high-level advisory bodies to governments and with international
bodies such as the International Committee on Radiation Protection. RWMC helps the national programmes through a
broad programme of work that: fosters a shared and broad-based understanding of the state of the art and emerging
issues; facilitates the elaboration of waste management strategies that respect societal requirements; helps to provide
common bases to the national regulatory frameworks; enables the management of radioactive waste and materials to
benefit from progress of scientific and technical knowledge; contributes to knowledge consolidation and transfer, e.g.,
through the organization of specialist meetings and publication of technical reports, consensus statements and short
flyers; and helps advance the state of the art, e.g., by providing a framework for the conduct of international peer reviews.
The latest collective statement of the RWMC dates to 2008 on “moving forward with geological disposal of radioactive
waste”; the latest peer review was of the French Dossier 2005. A new peer review of the safety report for a spent fuel
repository in Sweden is being organised. The RWMC holds multi-stakeholder, national workshops. The latest (2009) was
in France, in the siting region for the national HLW repository. The RWMC manages a database of country information,
in the form of a country reports and country profiles updated yearly; a summary of the regulatory infrastructure in NEA
countries is also maintained. Current work areas include: promoting greater understanding of radioactive waste
management and decommissioning disciplines; an international project on the topic of “retrievability and reversibility”;
assisting the organisation of an “International Conference on Geological Repositories” in Japan in 2011; initiating
dialogue with ICRP with a view to updating the ICRP guidance in the field of geological disposal; starting a project in
the field of information and memory keeping. Specific technical areas also include optimization, treatment of the very
long time scales, assessing the state of the art in safety assessment methods, and the operation phase of repositories. An
overview is provided of these activities and the relevant issues.
3) 40147 – Grimsel Test Site - Phase VI Status and Outlook
Ingo Blechschmidt, Sven Peter Teodori, Stratis Vomvoris, Nagra (Switzerland)
The Grimsel Test Site (GTS) (www.grimsel.com) is a generic underground research laboratory located in the
crystalline rocks of the Aare Massif of the Swiss Alps and is owned and operated by the National Cooperative for the
Disposal of Radioactive Waste (Nagra). The GTS is unique in that it includes a class B/C control zone in which
repository relevant radionuclides can be used as tracers of rock processes. 2009 marked the 25th year of GTS’s operation
and the current running Phase VI is planned until 2013. Experiments have evolved from those focused on characterising
the structural geology, groundwater geochemistry and hydrogeology of the test site during the 80s; to radionuclide
migration experiments in the 90s; and then more recently to assessing perturbation effects of repository implementation
and demonstrating engineering and operational aspects of the repository system for the last 10 years.
Currently over 25 international organisations participate in various projects at the GTS. On-going international
partner projects are as follows: evaluation of full-scale engineered systems under simulated heat production and
long-term natural saturation (FEBEXe); emplacement of a shotcrete low-pH plug (EC Project ESDRED); testing and
evaluation of standard monitoring techniques (TEM/MoDeRn) including both wired and non-wired techniques;
long-term cement studies (LCS) which aims at improving the understanding of low-pH cement interaction effects in
water conducting features; the Colloid Formation and Migration Project (CFM) which focuses on colloid generation and
migration from a bentonite source doped with radionuclides; and the Long-Term Diffusion (LTD) project which aims at
in-situ verification of long term diffusion concepts for radionuclides.
Additional experiments include techniques for determination of fracture network hydraulic and migration
parameters and behaviour of grouting materials. New large-scale experiments to test the emplacement techniques and
behaviour seals/plugs at 1:1 scale, under hydraulic pressure differential of up to 50 bars with parallel migration of
repository-generated gas are in the planning stage.
The status of the on-going experiments as well as the future plans and possibilities for new partners are summarised
in this poster presentation.
SESSION L4: Solidification and Package (2)
1) 40299 – Treatment of low level radioactive waste by plasma: a proven technology?
Jan Deckers, Belgoprocess, NV (Belgium)
Introduction Large amounts of actual and historical low level radioactive waste, with varying characteristics, are
stored and generated from the operation and maintenance of nuclear power plants, the nuclear fuel cycle, research
laboratories, pharmaceutical and medical facilities. Virtual all of these waste streams can be treated by the plasma
technology resulting in a final product free from organics, liquids and moisture, and meets without a doubt the
acceptance criteria for safe storage and disposal.
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