Status of the French Research Program on Partitioning and Transmutation

The production of nuclear energy in France has been associated, since its inception, with the optimization of radioactive waste management, including the partitioning and the recycling of recoverable energetic materials. From the start, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) has devoted considerable effort to the management of the back end of the cycle in order to extract the re-usable materials, uranium and plutonium, and to condition the resulting waste with the vitrification process. At the end of the December 1991 Waste Management Act, it is considered that partitioning techniques, which have been validated on real solutions with aqueous process, have been brought to a point where there is reasonable assurance that industrial deployment can be successful. For transmutation, CEA has conducted programs proving at lab scale the feasibility of the elimination of minor actinides and scenario studies have also allowed assessing the efficiency of transmutation in terms of the quantitative reduction of the final waste inventory depending on the reactor fleet of Pressurized Water Reactor-Fast Neutron Reactor-Accelerator Driven Systems (PWR-FR-ADS). For the future, the new Waste Management Act passed by the French Parliament on June 28, 2006, demands that Partitioning and Transmutation research continues in strong connection to GEN IV systems and ADS development, allowing to assess the industrial perspectives of such systems in 2012 and to put into operation a transmutation demo facility in 2020.