The German Cast-Concept for Intermediate Storage and Final Disposal of Spent Fuel

Based on a governmental resolution of the disposal of wastes from nuclear power stations in Germany, development work has been done since 1979 in the field of direct final disposal of spent fuel. In the period from 1981 to 1984, in the scope of the program \"Other disposal techniques\" (funded by BHFT, Federal Ministry of Research and Technology), the necessary work was performed to study the technical feasibility of this solution and establish a safety evaluation in order to be able to consider this solution as an alternate to reprocessing (see fig. 1). The results of this above-mentioned R + D work are the presented two containers POLLUX final disposal cask for storage in drifts and POLLUX canister for final storage in bore-holes These casks are designed to cover spent fuel for the direct final disposal which cannot be reprocessed for technical and economic reasons. The conditions for planning and design of the final dispoal cask and canister were chosen in such a way that the disposal of U- and HOX-fuel assemblies with high burn-ups is also possible. The principle of the conditioning procedure for the fuelpins is shown in f ig. 2. The schematic arrangement of the Gorleben salt-mine being used as a repository of nuclear waste is shown in fig. 3.