Minor actinides partitioning and transmutation technology in France

The global energy context pleads in favour of a sustainable development of nuclear energy. It is a technology with a future 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. From the start, the CEA has devoted considerable effort to management of the back end of the cycle. It furnished the process and techniques used in the La Hague facility to extract the re-usable materials, uranium and plutonium, and condition the resulting waste. Towards the end of the 1960's, it developed the process of vitrification for highly active waste that has become the world reference. French industry was responsible for the introduction of standard international practices with respect to waste conditioned during the processing of spent fuels. The specifications for the packages are approved by more than ten countries across the world.The law of 1991 specifically gave new momentum to the research into waste by requesting exploration not only into deep geological storage repositories, but also into reducing the quantity and toxicity of the long-life radioactive elements present in the waste by separation and transmutation and studying their conditioning for long-term disposal. All of the above-mentioned research has been conducted in close collaboration with partners from industry (ANDRA, EDF, COGEMA, FRAMATOME), with the CNRS (France) and various universities.A review of the situation ten years on indicates a number of significant results that have changed the prospects for nuclear waste management. The paper will focus on separation and transmutation R and D programme and main results at CEA. Over the past 10 years the CEA has been conducting a massive research programme on enhanced separation, supported by broad international co-operation. This year, 2001, saw some vital progress. Based on real solutions derived from the La Hague process, the CEA demonstrated the feasibility of extracting minor actinides using a process that can be extrapolated on the industrial scale. The CEA also conducted programmes proving the technical feasibility of the elimination of minor actinides by transmutation. With the help of the CNRS (France) in particular we developed high strength ceramic matrices to contain any radionuclides extracted by enhanced separation that might be deemed unsuitable for transmutation. (author)