First international meeting on national radioactive waste management organisations held in Paris

An international meeting was held in Paris from 7 to 9 June 2010 on the establishment of a radioactive waste management organisation in each country. Organised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with the support of ASN, DGEC ^[1] and ANDRA ^[2], the meeting brought together around 110 participants from over 50 countries.

The meeting had been agreed at the last Joint Convention ^[3] review meeting, held in Vienna in May 2009, the next review meeting being scheduled for May 2012. France organised the first meeting in Paris to provide continuity between the two Joint Convention review meetings. It wanted the meeting to be open to all IAEA member countries, and not just to the Contracting Parties to the Joint Convention, so that more countries could benefit from the experiences discussed, could engage in dialogue and could promote the Convention.

Many French bodies from the radioactive waste management sector spoke at the meeting. Pierre-Franck Chevet, Director General for Energy and Climate, gave the opening speech. Marie-Claude Dupuis, Director General of ANDRA, presented ANDRA's experiences and chaired the session on new national organisations for radioactive waste management. Jean-Rémi Gouze, ASN Commissioner, chaired the session on the institutional relations of these organisations, and André-Claude Lacoste, Chairman of the ASN Commission, gave the closing speech for the event.

There were rich discussions at the meeting on the subject of government responsibility for radioactive waste management, with French speakers (including ASN) defending a coherent management policy with appropriate waste management solutions for all types of wastes. Discussions also covered the model for centralised national waste management organisations, their status and resources, independence, R&D programme and policy on transparency. The meeting also provided an opportunity to highlight the way waste management is organised in France, and to compare this with other countries' approaches to this issue.

On 9 June those attending the meeting were able to visit waste management facilities run by ANDRA.

The next meeting was scheduled for 2013.

[1] DGEC is the Directorate General for Energy and Climate at the Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea.

[2] ANDRA is the French National Radioactive Waste Management Agency, a public institution with industrial and commercial activities, responsible for the management and disposal of radioactive waste.

[3] The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste, governed by the IAEA, complements the Convention on Nuclear Safety. It was approved by France on 22 February 2000 and came into force on 18 June 2001. The Convention stipulates that every Contracting Party attending the review meetings (held every three years) must present a report describing how it is implementing the obligations of the Convention. For France, the writing of this report has been coordinated by ASN with contributions from the other regulatory authorities and the nuclear operators. Each national report was subjected to a series of questions and answers by the other countries and then presented in Vienna.