Status of the French Research on Partitioning and Transmutation

Abstract

The global energy context pleads in favour of a sustainable development of nuclear energy since the demand for energy will likely increase, whereas resources will tend to get scarcer and the prospect of global warming will drive down the consumption of fossil fuel sources.

How we deal with radioactive waste is crucial in this context. The production of nuclear energy in France has been associated, since its inception, with the optimization of radioactive waste management, including the partitioning and the recycling of recoverable energetic materials. The public’s concern regarding the long-term waste management made the French Government to prepare and pass the December 1991 Law, requesting in particular the study for fifteen years of solutions for still minimizing the quantity and the hazardousness of final waste, via partitioning and transmutation.

At the end of these fifteen years of research, it is considered that partitioning techniques which have been validated on real solutions are at disposal. Indeed, aqueous process for separation of minor actinides from the PUREX raffinate has been brought to a point where there is reasonable assurance that industrial deployment can be successful. A key experiment has been the kilogram scale successful trials in the CEA-Marcoule Atalante facility in 2005 and this result, together with the results obtained in the frame of the successive European projects, constitutes a considerable step forward. For transmutation, CEA has conducted programmes proving the feasibility of the elimination of minor actinides and fission products: fabrication of specific targets and fuels for transmutation tests in the HFR and Phénix reactors, neutronics and technology studies for critical reactors and ADS developments. Scenario studies have also allowed assessing the feasibility, at the level of cycle and fuel facilities, and the efficiency of transmutation in terms of the quantitative reduction of the final waste inventory depending of the reactor fleet (PWR-FR-ADS).

Important results are now available concerning the possibility of significantly reducing the quantity and the radiotoxicity of long-lived waste in association with a sustainable development of nuclear energy. As France has confirmed its long-term approach to nuclear energy, the most effective implementation of P and T of minor actinides relies on the fast neutron GEN IV systems which are designed to recycle and manage their own actinides. The perspective to deploy a first series of such systems around 2040 supports the idea that progress is being made: the long-term waste would only be made up of fission products, with very low amounts of minor actinides.

In this sense, the new waste management Law passed by the French Parliament on June 28, 2006, demands that P and T research continues in strong connection to GEN IV systems and ADS development and allowing to assess the industrial perspectives of such systems in 2012 and to put into operation a transmutation demo facility in 2020.