Link to the study - European Parliament - Europa

Policy Department D: Budgetary Affairs
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and tasks) is to allow removal of some or all of the regulatory controls that apply to the nuclear
facility while securing the long-term safety of the public and the environment, and continuing to
protect the health and safety of decommissioning workers in the process.' (AF-Colenco 2008)
2.2.3. Basic strategic decision on decommissioning waste
The process of removal of all activated and contaminated equipment is called decommissioning. As
most of the physical materials of a reactor were not affected by a considerable neutron flux and never
got in contact with contaminated liquids (e.g. the electricity generators), the amount of nonradioactive
waste is much larger than the radioactive wastes.
The further steps in the decommissioning of a facility depend to a high degree on a basic
management decision for all materials from controlled areas of the reactor 3 :
1. To minimize the amount of radioactive wastes later to be disposed of in a final disposal facility
with a 'high' or 'excellent' isolation potential by extended separation and decontamination
efforts. Material processing is designed to release as much as possible of the non-radioactive
materials by applying radiological control release procedures and to handle either the
unconditionally released material via conventional waste streams (e.g. steel and concrete
recycling) or as conditionally released waste for specific use or conventional surface disposal.
This strategy can, generally speaking, be termed as 're-concentration': the contamination that
was previously spread over larger parts of the reactor is concentrated into a smaller fraction of
wastes to be disposed of later in a specific disposal facility (final disposal).
2. To separate only those activated and contaminated materials with an elevated content for later
disposal in a facility with a medium or high isolation potential, to remove all materials that are
obviously non-radioactive and to dispose all the rest of materials in a disposal facility with a low
isolation potential. Under this mode rooms, equipment and items of the facility are simply
characterized into three categories: 'no activation/contamination', 'small or scattered
contamination' and 'high contamination'. Only the first category leaves the site heading for
conventional waste streams, while the latter two categories are disposed of in a designated nearsurface
or geologic disposal facility.
It is obvious that management route no. 1 means extensive efforts in decontamination as well as
measuring materials and items with small concentration levels and a sophisticated administrational
scheme to prevent erroneous release of radioactive items to uncontrolled conventional material
streams, while route no. 2 means the opposite and disposes large amounts of only slightly
contaminated material unnecessarily as waste. The terms 'high', 'medium' and 'low' isolation potential
also need clarification, because decommissioning wastes by no means consist only of 'short-lived' 4
3
Equipment, items or buildings from areas not under radiological control can, if not needed any more, be
re-used or removed in a conventional way.
4
Short-lived radionuclides have a short half life time, such as roughly 5 years for Cobalt-60 in activated or
contaminated steel. In disposal, those radionuclides, if mobilized by corrosion, washout or other
mechanisms, absorb on geologic layers and are decayed before any of the nuclides enter accessible
surface water streams.
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