Chapter 6 - Advances toward sustainable radioactive waste conditioning and storage practices

Abstract

Conditioning and storage of nuclear/radioactive wastes (RW) are essential activities that are implemented to ensure the safe management of these wastes. The conditioning includes the immobilization, packaging, and over-packing of these wastes. These activities are practiced in either mobile or fixed units hosted at the waste generators, centralized waste treatment, storage, or disposal facilities. The advances in these practices aim to enhance the safety and security of the conditioning units and the hosting facilities, produce waste forms that comply with subsequent management activities, and reduce the associated environmental impacts. In addition, there are efforts that are directed to increase the technology readiness level rating for innovative immobilization technologies; these efforts are derived from the need to address the efficient immobilization of some problematic waste streams. Moreover, there are increasing research activities that aim to improve the characterization of the waste packages and develop an automated system to remotely operate the storage facility. This chapter highlights some of these efforts by summarizing the operational experience with different immobilization technologies, overview the advances in increase of the technology readiness for innovative technologies for the immobilization of problematic wastes, and presents some examples of the advances in waste package characterization and storage. Relevant case studies are provided to illustrate the need to develop these technologies and systems, overview their description, and the practice or technology readiness where appropriate.