Long-lived fission product transmutation studies

The transmutation of long-lived fission products (LLFP) is being studied by CEA (France), NRG (Netherlands) and ITU (Germany). The fission products considered are technetium ⁹⁹Tc, iodine ¹²⁹I and caesium ¹³⁵Cs. In the past years, an experimental program was started to investigate the material aspects of transmutation of these fission products, with different irradiations in thermal and fast reactors. After having chosen LLFP target chemical forms, material R and D is ongoing in order to fabricate and to characterise samples, for irradiation experiments in the thermal reactor HFR-Petten (Netherlands) and in the fast reactor (FR) Phenix (France). For CEA, a special purpose of this programme is to have sufficient information to assess the feasibility of LLFP transmutation in 2006