Feedback of the Dutch Historical Waste Management Program - 17085
This paper provides a feedback on the Dutch historical waste management program. Over the past decades, the High Flux Reactor located in Petten in the province of North Holland has tested numerous types of materials and fuels irradiation, for both medical and nuclear energy applications. A number of waste containers was accumulated on site, where the storage facility was initially built. Following Dutch political decisions in the 1980's, the contents of the waste storage facility in Petten must be transferred to another location. The consequences of this decision included the transportation of waste containers from Petten to the new location, which is located in the South-West of the Netherlands. This project was initiated and is now running. It includes a complex structure and can be described as follows: each historical-waste container will be opened, its contents segregated in three categories depending on the dose rate emission, characterized and repacked in new containers suitable for transportation and storage at the new site. The approach chosen is based on the final dose rate emitted by the repacked containers, which are sub-divided into 3 categories.. The lowest dose-emitting containers are transported directly to the new storage facility. The 2 other categories are first transported to a third party to be super compacted and subsequently transported to the new storage facility. So far, the segregation method is based on Co-60 gamma emission and nuclide vectors associated to the different materials. A pre-sorting has been established to fit as much as possible IAEA recommendations. Historical waste has then to be classified in families sharing common history. Thus, a set of canisters containing the pieces of the old reactor vessel, which was replaced in 1984 was the first challenge, followed by a set of canisters containing residues of instruments only and pieces coming from the top of the control rods of the reactor which were not directly irradiated in the reactor. So far, the two first sets of canisters are being treated and characterized as well as possible. Reporting and official documents have been filled up to comply to Dutch transport regulations and to define waste acceptance criteria for the storage facility. The first transports of containers with Low Level Waste occurred in October 2015, and another transport took place at the end of 2016. (authors)