Nuclear safety: decommissioning of obsolete installations at the JCR and waste management

PURPOSE : Commission communication on historical liabilities resulting from nuclear activities carried out at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) under the Euratom Treaty · decommissioning of obsolete nuclear installations and waste management. CONTENT : The Commission plans to take a comprehensive global approach and implement an Action Programme covering a period of about 15 years. The programme concerns all JRC establishments where nuclear activities have been or are still being undertaken. It can be broken down into three parts: 1) Preparation of infrastructure and facilities needed for waste management - this mainly concerns the Ispra site, where the installations were designed in a different age and in a different context. The measures to be taken include decontamination, immobilisation of solid wastes and the installation of a plant to solidify liquid wastes. Management of waste resulting from activities undertaken at the JRC since 1960 on behalf of Euratom · waste must now be conditioned in order to be stored eventually in national repositories, and irradiated fuels from the ESSOR reactor must be prepared for the return to the USA. Decommissioning of obsolete installations · this main part of the programme involves both the preparation of installations for decommissioning and the management of waste generated by dismantling. The document gives further details of all these aspects of the Action Programme. The main uncertainty is the absence of final repositories or even precise regulation in some Member States or at Community level. The broad outlines are, however, in place due to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Framework Programmes and a financial evaluation is made on the best possible scenarios, although it must be treated with caution. Specialist companies will carry out most of the work. Technical back up from the JRC is essential. It must be stressed that legal responsibility for implementation of the Action Programme lies with the Community. With regard to financing, the Commission does not see additional resources as necessary. It intends to cover expenditure by transferring credits from budgetary lines that would not spend their full allocation by the end of the year. Further details on financing are provided. An estimate of 230M euros is foreseen to cover the overall historical liability.�