Proceedings of the workshop on European collaboration for the management of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste by technology transfer and shared facilities

The management of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and radioactive high level waste (HLW) involves conditioning, transport, storage and geological disposal, with the overall objective of preventing the release of radionuclides to the biosphere over a very long time scale. Geological disposal is widely seen as the most realistic long-term solution. Much progress has been made in Europe over the past decades to develop such solutions. Although the responsibility for taking care of the radioactive waste lies with the individual Member State, it is obvious that the implementation of long-term solutions would benefit from working together. For the European Commission it is a priority that all Member States develop and implement long-term solutions for their radioactive waste. Two European Commission projects were intended to explore different collaboration models in radioactive waste management, namely the projects SAPIERR-1 and -2 that looked into the possibility of establishing regional repositories, and the project CATT that explored the scope for shared management facilities and technology transfer between Member States. This report summarises the events and conclusions of a workshop that intended to - bring together the SAPIERR and CATT project partners, as well as other stakeholders, in order to explore the complementary aspects of the initiatives; - facilitate the sharing of the main results of CATT and the interim findings of SAPIERR (which runs until November 2008), as well as the conclusions and experience from other organisations on Member State collaboration for waste management; - discuss the state of knowledge and future needs and propose collaborations. The workshop arrived at an agreed catalogue of issues and opportunities that can be used to shape future collaborative actions. This catalogue was developed in brainstorming discussions and included SWOT-analyses arriving at the 'pros' and 'cons' of the respective issues.