Year
2010
File Attachment
Abstract
ENEA and NUCLECO have established at the Casaccia Research Centre a technical unit called \"Integrated Services\" which takes care of all radioactive waste produced by hospitals, research centres and industry, and, waiting for the national disposal facility, remains owner for them in the temporary storage. NUCLECO covers all the operative phases, including packaging, transport, volume reduction treatment, conditioning for nuclear power plant waste too. At the end of the conditioning procedures there are, for the scope of this paper, two types of waste packages: industrial ones for LSA-II and packages for high activity sources. Packages containing LSA-II are produced by solid volume reduction, performed through 220 l drums supercompaction, stacking of the pellets inside a metallic 380 l overpack and then pouring of a concrete compound. Same packages are generated by treatment of liquid wastes, performed by a biological and chemical-physical process, mixing the sludge with cement inside a 200 l drum and get rid of the clear water. The paper gives details on packages qualification referring to “the waste form”, with compression test, thermal cycling, radiation resistance test, biodegradation resistance test, immersion test, water permeability, free liquids test, and referring to the “transport” with long term corrosion test, free drop, stacking and penetration tests. Packages containing disused high activity sources must be mainly of Type B(U) and ENEA is studying several types of shielded containment systems for gamma and neutron sources, to ensure their characteristics over a long period. The design of containment system, as regards the choice of materials for the construction and the thicknesses used, is aimed to comply with transport regulations, taking into account the characteristics of mechanical and thermal protection guaranteed by external part of the package, a model of which was approved by the Competent Authority as Type B (U) for different contents. The paper shows how we can guarantee packages complying with the waste characteristics as approved by the competent authorities for the storage facility and with the transport regulations, at present and in the next 30 years.