Optimising environmental steps for the ASTRID project

Often felt as a stress in the 90s, projects can no longer ignore the ISO environmental directives governing design. As the 4^th generation reactor project, the ASTRID team has decided to go further in its approach by taking full responsibility to optimise the environmental steps within a sustainable development strategy which systematically looks to minimise the environmental impact of the project per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. This also illustrates the importance of public acceptance, by considering the environmental requirements as a positive way of ensuring a responsible performance label. The paper describes a series of practical measures taken by the CEA as the project owner (identification of environmental requirements in the structuring documents, ecological inventory of the prospective site’s biotope, impact assessment, etc.) and by their engineering partners in their pre-conceptual studies. For example, natural resources will be optimised and minor actinides will be incinerated (radioactive waste) in the core; design options will be compared on the basis of environmental criteria for the nuclear island; and in terms of non-nuclear installations, a High Environmental Quality approach will be used to design the building housing the turbine. This paper describes the expected status of the nuclear island at the end of the pre-conceptual design phase; some reservations do remain in this paper since certain pre-conceptual design decisions will only be confirmed at the end of 2012. (author)