State of the Art in packaging, storage, and monitoring of cemented wastes: PREDIS Deliverable 7.1

Solid and liquid radioactive waste is progressively being generated by the nuclear industry and institutional producers like healthcare and research. Such waste must be appropriately conditioned in order to be acceptable for storage and eventual disposal. Among possible conditioning processes, encapsulation of waste by means of an industrial cementitious grout is currently implemented by many EU member states. Medium to long-term storage, indicated in the National Programmes of many European countries as the strategy to deal with the delays of available disposal solutions, requires monitoring of waste packages for possible degradation phenomena and managing any arising issues prior to transport to the final repositories. Therefore, innovation in the area of degradation prevention and early detection by means of advanced monitoring systems based on innovative techniques provides significant opportunities for all member states in terms of improved storage operations, reduced cost, increased safety and better understanding of the characteristics of waste prior to final disposal. Within this framework, the first important objective of the PREDIS-WP7 project on “Innovations in cemented waste handling and pre-disposal storage” is understanding and tracking the State of The Art (SoTA) of current methods and procedures used for cemented waste management with specific focus on monitoring during long-term storage. The approach to gathering the information needed for the SoTA included use of a questionnaire circulated to a large number of organizations registered as End Users of the project. The results of the survey which involved eleven respondents provided an initial picture of the main aspects related to the storage of cemented waste packages such as the types of waste streams stored, main waste package typologies, storage management strategies, degradation phenomena expected or observed, and monitoring systems currently employed. The SoTA may be updated in later years of the project to incorporate progress in technology and newly gathered data hopefully by physical information exchange at meetings with or site visits to End Users when the COVID-19 Pandemics will be finally overcome.