Towards an assessment of partition and transmutation

In France, after 15 years of research launched by the 1991 Law on High Level Waste, l'Office Parlementaire de l'Evaluation des Choix Scientifiques et Technologiques has published its report due to the Chambers after hearings of the actors of the research and of different stakeholders. The first conclusions are that Partition/Transmutation (P and T), Disposal and Interim Storage have to be considered as complementary ways of dealing with the High Level Waste. The technical feasibility of the Partition process is about to be proven, including a small scale demonstration on active solutions in the Atalante facility. The feasibility of Transmutation will be comforted by the present experiments in the Phenix facility. There are several recommendations in the report: the timing of implementation of a partition transmutation cycle in France will have to coincide with the need for a renewal of the present reprocessing plant and the need for a fuel cycle serving a new generation of Power Reactors. At the same time, P and T may induce disposal cost reduction that may cover a part of the cost in P and T. As a matter of fact, present reprocessing and recycling reduces the waste volume and toxicity and therefore is beneficial to the disposal capacity and cost. However, at the present time, disposal costs reduction due to P and T are difficult to estimate, since optimization of disposal is still to be done. P and T costs are difficult to estimate as well, since they may include not only separative shops, targets fabrication and reprocessing units but actinide incinerators. This paper provides some reflections on the possible benefits in implementing P and T. The benefits will come either from toxicity reduction, thermal load reduction, or from other less tangible reasons as it may increase the positive perception of a disposal by reducing uncertainties or time perspective. Our proposition is to focus more the next R and D programs on the assessments of P and T benefits and drawbacks. A period of time of 10 years appears to be a reasonable target for achieving such a goal. That should include not only scenarios and cost evaluations but also a large multi-criteria analysis, encompassing environmental impacts and, if possible, an evaluation of the perception of the disposal by stakeholders with and without P and T. Benefits and drawbacks should be balanced and serve as guidelines for the coming research programs on this matter, including demonstration facilities. (authors)