Session: 10-01 R&D - Euratom-funded R&D Overviews

Paper Number: 109025

109025 - 10 Years of Collaborative Research in Decommissioning and Radioactive Waste Management Under the Euratom Research and Training Programme 

The European Commission has supported research and innovation in the fields of decommissioning of nuclear facilities and radioactive waste management for more than 40 years through the Euratom Research and Training (R&T) programme. The programme aims at supplementing the national research programmes dedicated to these topics and addresses the relevant technological gaps and needs of the scientific community. Its impacts bring a shared European added value and support the implementation of the EC directives and its general orientations.

The Horizon 2020 R&T programme was launched in 2014 and ended in 2020; the on-going programme, Horizon Europe followed in 2021. Both resulted in key achievements that will pave the way to the future research and innovation actions in decommissioning and radioactive waste management.

On the topic of the decommissioning of nuclear facilities, the Euratom programme has granted around 25 million euro over the last 9 years to projects. It has established a strategic research agenda and a roadmap with more than 140 identified activities for which R&D is needed (the SHARE project). The programme also supported innovative projects to address specific key technological needs (e.g. the decommissioning of graphite moderated reactors with the INNO4GRAPH project, instrumentation for the radiological characterization with the MICADO project), to improve the technological readiness level of promising technologies (e.g. Building Information Modelling with the PLEIADES project, laser-cutting technologies with the LD-SAFE project, and remote controlled robots with the CLEANDEM project) and to promote the sharing of knowledge and best practices (the HARPERS project).

During the Horizon 2020 programme, around 78 million euro were granted to projects and programmes on radioactive waste management. Additionally, there was an important shift in the nature of the research activities and the projects funded by the European Commission towards further integration of their results in RWM. Following the establishment of the Implementing Geological Disposal of radioactive waste Technology Platform (IGD-TP) in 2009, two sister networks started within EC projects and were officially launched: the SITEX Network created a Technical Safety Organisation (TSO) community in 2018 and EURADSCIENCE established a network for the Research Entities (RE) involved in RWM in 2019. An important initiative was also launched in 2016 with the project JOPRAD as a preparatory phase for a European Joint Programme (EJP) on RWM that encompasses all research activities from the waste generation to its final disposal. These efforts eventually led to the start of the first EJP EURAD in 2019 and its sister project PREDIS dedicated to the predisposal activities of low and intermediate level waste. The joint programme was built around the needs of the three established platforms (IGD-TP, SITEX and EURADSCIENCE). It has reduced the administrative burden of what was numerous individual research actions and significantly contributed to collaborative R&D. It helped to transfer knowledge and experiences and to foster cross-fertilisation between the front runner countries and those with a longer time scale.

Building up on the achievements of the first EJP, a new Partnership on RWM under the Horizon Europe programme should be launched in 2024 which will also include the predisposal activities and promote further interactions with other international organisations (e.g. NEA/OECD, IAEA) and relevant stakeholders such as the waste generators and the regulatory bodies.

Presenting Author: Seif Ben Hadj Hassine European Commission

Presenting Author Biography: Seif has worked for more than 12 years in the decommissioning and the radioactive waste management field. He graduated from Ecole des Mines de Paris in France in 2009 and obtained his PhD in Civil Engineering on the development of a decontamination process for radioactive concrete structures in 2012. The PhD was a tripartite collaboration of the CEA of Marcoule, the université of Toulouse and the French company Bouygues Construction. He then did an 18-month postdoctoral fellowship at the IRSN, the French TSO, in Fontenay-aux-Roses on the modelling of two-phase flows in clay formations using Lattice-Boltzmann models. From 2015, he has worked for 6 years in the RD&D department of the Belgian WMO, ONDRAF/NIRAS. The scope of his duties included the disposability assessment of conditioned radioactive waste, the development of cementation processes for radioactive waste streams and research projects related to the behavior of the EBS in a deep geological repository. In January 2021, Seif has joined the Euratom unit of the Directorate General Research and Innovation at the European Commission as a Policy and Scientific Programme Officer. He has been since then the new Project Officer of EURAD and PREDIS, as well as a large portfolio of projects related to the decommissioning of nuclear facilities.