Waste management - how?
Wastes
Types of radioactive waste
High-level waste
Management of spent fuel
Low- and intermediate-level waste
Volumes
Transport
Radiation and radioactive waste
Transmutation
Waste producers
Nuclear power plants
Nuclear fuel cycle
Reprocessing
Operational waste from NPPs
Decommissioning of NPPs
Medicine, industry and research
Waste management concept
Waste management programme
Why deep geological disposal?
Ethics and responsibility
Waste management options
Demonstration of disposal feasibility
Long-term safety
Retrievability
Deep geological repositories
Geological repository HLW
Geological repository LLW
Waste management today
Packaging
Interim storage
Waste inventories
Natural analogues
Natural analogues for engineered barriers
Natural analogues for glass
Natural analogues for metal
Natural analogues for clay
Natural analogues for geological barriers
Geological barriers – cristalline rock
Geological barriers – clay
Example ammonite
Example salt deposit
Natural reactors
Research
Laboratory studies
Rock laboratories
Grimsel
Geology
Experiments
Mont Terri
Geology
Experiments
Other countries
Belgium
Finland
France
Germany
The Netherlands
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
Canada
Japan
USA
High-level waste (HLW)
Reprocessing of spent fuel recovers re-usable uranium and the activation product plutonium for further energy production. Fission products and other activation products are separated out and melted together with additives to form a glass. The solidified glass blocks have to be disposed of as high-level waste.
Spent fuel not destined for reprocessing is also treated as high-level waste. It is held in interim storage for several decades and then emplaced in a deep geological repository.
A disposal container will hold two glass moulds from reprocessing. (Image: Nagra)
