New guidelines for assessment of radionuclides confinement application to nuclear power scenarios

Under the provisions of the 1991 French radioactive waste management law, various fuel cycle scenarios will be assessed and compared in terms of ultimate waste radio-toxic inventory. This criterion may be further broken down into ''potential radio-toxic inventory'' and ''residual radio-toxic inventory'' but none can take into account the effort made to confine the radionuclides. The innovative scientific contribution of this study is to consider a third type of radio-toxic inventory: the potential radio-toxic inventory after conditioning, i.e. taking into account the containment capacity of the radionuclide conditioning matrices. This approach reveals significant differences among the scenarios considered that do not appear when only the 'raw' potential radio-toxic inventory is taken into account. Plutonium recycling scenarios thus reduce the potential radiotoxicity by roughly a factor of 50 compared with an open cycle; the gain rises to a factor of about 300 for scenarios in which Pu and the minor actinides are recycled. Interestingly, the results obtained by the use of a dedicated containment matrix for the minor actinides in a scenario limited to Pu recycling were comparable to those provided by transmutation of the minor actinides. (author)