Anticipate the management of future ITER waste

ITER is an international nuclear fusion research facility (see box) under construction in the South of France. Very upstream of the commissioning of this facility, discussions were initiated on how to manage the radioactive waste that will be produced there. The first contacts with Andra, in charge of the management of French radioactive waste, were initiated in 2007 and led, in 2016, to the signing of an agreement between the Agency and ITER Organization to carry out the necessary studies in radioactive waste management.

The recent start of assembly is an occasion to look at how the ITER waste, with its specific characteristices, will be managed, and eventually, disposed of at an Andra facility.

.

Different categories of waste

"The waste produced by ITER will initially be of very low activity, then becomes more active as the reactor ramps up," explains Robert Mandoki, who is leading discussions on this subject at Andra. It will therefore be necessary to manage different categories of waste over time: very low activity waste (VLL), then low and intermediate short-lived activity (FMA-VC), and finally long-lived medium activity (IL-VL) . "The first phase of the work therefore consisted for Andra in evaluating the management strategy for the different waste types, as proposed by ITER. A series of recommendations were issued, so that future waste can be accepted by the appropriate Andra disposal facilities.

Confining tritium

The future ITER waste will have one major characteristic: it will be loaded with tritium, a highly mobile radioelement. "The tritium concentration is evaluated against a criterion (a limit value) for accepting waste in our various disposal facilities," says Robert Mandoki. The ITER Organization has already planned waste treatment processes that will reduce the tritium content, or even recover some of this tritium so that it can be reused as fuel. "

For its part, Andra has made various recommendations, for example the development of innovative disposal containers that would better confine tritium. At the same time, it supports several research projects such as the MACH 3 project, funded by the "Investments for the future" program. Initiated in 2017, in partnership with other research organizations, in particular the CEA, this project aims to study containers with tritium "trappers". Another project supported by Andra: VALOFUSION, which is interested in a treatment process for highly tritiated metal waste. Finally, the European TRANSAT program aims to further increase technical knowledge on the behavior of tritium in order to reduce its impact on the environment.

(1) International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor

(2) ITER Organization is the owner and future operator of the facility; the CEA is the "host organization" of the ITER project; the ITER France Agency is an administrative and budgetary autonomous entity, created by interministerial decree within the CEA, to implement the commitments made by France in the ITER project as the host state; in particular, Agence ITER France is piloting the establishment of a network for handling tritiated waste from the ITER facility, in cooperation with Andra, and will be responsible for the project management of the construction of a nuclear decay installation intended to accommodate this tritiated waste from ITER as well as that resulting from civil activities carried out in France using tritium. It is also currently expected that the CEA / Agence ITER France will be in charge of the dismantling operations of the ITER base nuclear installation on the basis of specific contributions from international partners, collected by the ITER Organization.