Disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear research facilities

Swiss radioactive wastes originate from nuclear power plants (NPP) and from medicine (e.g. radiation sources), industry (e.g. fire detectors) and research (e.g. CERN, PSI). Their conditioning, characterisation and documentation 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 as well as the processes responsible for the buildup of short and long lived radionuclides are well known, and the conditioning procedures are 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 heterogeneous waste sorts with radiological inventories quite different from NPP waste and difficult to measure long lived radionuclides. In order to control the "back end" costs, their arisings and characterisation should be considered already during planning of (new) research projects. After a short introduction to the Swiss waste management concept with reference to 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 inventarisation of waste from accelerator facilities are described. Finally we propose a scheme for the waste handling of CERN facilities 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 to the radwaste management at CERN).