Specific aspects of decommissioning

Decommissioning covers a sequence of operations which must be carefully designed and organized to take into account the hostile environment and involving, excepted if reuse is envisaged, destructive processes which are typical of the irreversibility of the procedure. The existence of a hostile environment results in providing for the appropriate methods and specific equipment to give access to the equipment to be dismantled. Dismantling results in a significant quantity of active and inactive waste to be sent to disposal. Finally, site work specifically consists in modifying continuously a nuclear plant, due to dismantling work underway. Definition of decommissioning stages is given in Appendix