 | Workshop on Radiation Protection Issues related to Radioactive Ion Beam Facilities |
Organized by CERN, Geneva - ISOLDE, Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich - MAFF, EURISOL - Target and ion source working group
| Workshop on Radiation Protection Issues related to Radioactive Ion Beam Facilities |
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Switzerland has radioactive waste from nuclear power plants (NPP) and from medicine (e.g. radiation sources), industry (e.g. fire detectors) and research (e.g. CERN, PSI). The conditioning, characterisation and documentation of waste from these sources has to meet the demands given by the Swiss regulatory authorities including all information needed for a safe disposal in future repositories. For NPP wastes, arisings including the processes responsible for the the buildup of short and long lived radionuclides are well known and the conditioning procedures established. The radiological inventories are determined on a routinely basis using a combined system of measurements and calculational programs. For waste from research, the situation is more complicated. The wide spectrum of different installations combined with a poorly known history of primary and secondary radiation results in heterogenous waste sorts with radiological inventories (completely) different from the NPP waste with difficult to measure long lived radionuclides. In order to control the "back end" costs, waste arisings of waste and characterization should be considered already during planning of (new) research projects.
After a short introduction to the Swiss waste management concept including the relevant waste properties (nuclide inventory, waste matrix and package) the most important waste acceptance criteria and the concept of "waste package types" are presented. The conditioning and inventarization of waste from accelerator facilities are described and some examples based on already exisiting experience are given. Finally we propose a scheme for the waste handling of CERN facilities including the role of Nagra and the computer based "Information System for Radioactive Materials" (ISRAM) which was developed to document the whole spectrum of radioactive materials (and could also be applied for the radwaste management at CERN).