Radioactive Waste Management 2012 Reversibility and Retrievability in Planning for Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste Proceedings of the “R&R” International Conference and Dialogue 14-17 December 2010, Reims, France Reims 2010 14 - 17 December 2010 An international conference and dialogue organised by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, European Commission DG-Energy and EDRAM, and hosted by Andra www.r-r-reims2010.com NEA Radioactive Waste Management ISBN 978-92-64-99185-9 Reversibility and Retrievability in Planning for Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste Proceedings of the “R&R” International Conference and Dialogue 14-17 December 2010 Reims, France © OECD 2012 NEA No. 6993 Nuclear Energy Agency Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ORGANISATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT The OECD is a unique forum where the governments of 34 democracies work together to address the economic, social and environmental challenges of globalisation. The OECD is also at the forefront of efforts to understand and to help governments respond to new developments and concerns, such as corporate governance, the information economy and the challenges of an ageing population. The Organisation provides a setting where governments can compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and work to co-ordinate domestic and international policies. The OECD member countries are: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Korea, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The European Commission takes part in the work of the OECD. OECD Publishing disseminates widely the results of the Organisation’s statistics gathering and research on economic, social and environmental issues, as well as the conventions, guidelines and standards agreed by its members. This work is published on the responsibility of the OECD Secretary-General. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Organisation or of the governments of its member countries. NUCLEAR ENERGY AGENCY The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) was established on 1 February 1958. Current NEA membership consists of 30 OECD member countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Republic of Korea, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The European Commission also takes part in the work of the Agency. The mission of the NEA is: – to assist its member countries in maintaining and further developing, through international co-operation, the scientific, technological and legal bases required for a safe, environmentally friendly and economical use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, as well as – to provide authoritative assessments and to forge common understandings on key issues, as input to government decisions on nuclear energy policy and to broader OECD policy analyses in areas such as energy and sustainable development. Specific areas of competence of the NEA include the safety and regulation of nuclear activities, radioactive waste management, radiological protection, nuclear science, economic and technical analyses of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear law and liability, and public information. The NEA Data Bank provides nuclear data and computer program services for participating countries. In these and related tasks, the NEA works in close collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, with which it has a Co-operation Agreement, as well as with other international organisations in the nuclear field. This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area. Corrigenda to OECD publications may be found online at: www.oecd.org/publishing/corrigenda. © OECD 2012 You can copy, download or print OECD content for your own use, and you can include excerpts from OECD publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials, provided that suitable acknowledgment of the OECD as source and copyright owner is given. All requests for public or commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to [email protected]. Requests for permission to photocopy portions of this material for public or commercial use shall be addressed directly to the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at [email protected] or the Centre français d'exploitation du droit de copie (CFC) [email protected]. Photo credit: ANDRA. FOREWORD Foreword In 2007 the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC) launched a four-year project on the topics of reversibility and retrievability in geological disposal. The goal of the project studies and activities (www.oecd-nea.org/rwm/rr) was to acknowledge the range of approaches to reversibility and retrievability (R&R), rather than to recommend a specific approach, and to provide a basis for reflection rather than to lead towards a particular conclusion. The NEA Working Group on Reversibility and Retrievability enjoyed participation from 15 countries and 2 international organisations. The project benefited from exchanges among an ever-widening group of interested parties that culminated in the International Conference and Dialogue on Reversibility and Retrievability in Planning for Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste held in Reims, France, in December 2010. The members of the R&R project prepared the three-day conference and dialogue in order to open the discussions to a larger audience. The objectives of the conference included allowing and recording as many points of view as possible, discussing and better understanding commonalities and differences, testing and refining the findings of the draft NEA R&R project report, and refining the international R-scale, a tool for dialogue that has been developed within the framework of the NEA R&R project. The event was open to all interested parties and featured participation from civil society stakeholders, implementers and scientific researchers, regulators, policy makers and social scientists. Some 180 persons attended, making or hearing plenary presentations, and dialoguing in breakout round-table sessions. Among the key points that emerged were: • The development of any geological repository for radioactive waste will take place over many decades and should be open to progress in science and technology, to evolving societal demands and to fixing potential implementation errors. In this regard, selecting technologies that are as reversible as possible is a prudent approach. There is interest in a number of countries to show that retrieval of the waste is feasible during the period of waste emplacement or even during a certain period after closure of the repository. • While countries differ in their plans to study retrieval before or after closure of a repository, the Retrievability Scale developed by the NEA R&R project is a useful communication tool across contexts. It shows that even if geological disposal is intrinsically a reversible technology, ease of retrieval through the various stages of repository implementation can only be a matter of degree. • There is strong societal interest in reversibility of decisions or retrievability of waste, as indicated by legal provisions in many countries. In France, for instance, reversibility is at the core of the current technical and societal debate framed by its stepwise waste management process. There is universal agreement, however, that R&R provisions are never to interfere with long-term safety. R&R only add value to a final management solution that rests on passive safety. • Reversibility of decisions and retrievability of waste are complex subjects that cannot be considered in isolation from safety and societal issues. Further reflection and dialogue are needed, in particular to harmonise vocabulary and to define key terms such as R&R IN PLANNING FOR GEOLOGICAL DISPOSAL OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE, ISBN 978-92-64-99185-9, © OECD 2012 3 FOREWORD “disposal”, “storage”, “waste” and “closure”. Because there is no “one size fits all”, each concept should be adapted to its national context. These proceedings contain the conference presentations, the reports from the round-table sessions and the poster abstracts. All are published under the responsibility of their authors. 4 R&R IN PLANNING FOR GEOLOGICAL DISPOSAL OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE, ISBN 978-92-64-99185-9, © OECD 2012 TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents Executive Summary .............................................................................................................................. 9 NEA Perspective ..................................................................................................................................... 15 Setting the Scene ..................................................................................................................................