Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, National Report of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, First Review Conference

On 10 March 1999, The Netherlands signed the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management, which was subsequently formally ratified on 26 April 2000 and entered into force on 18 June 2001. The Joint Convention obliges each contracting party to apply widely recognized principles and tools in order to achieve and maintain high standards of safety during management of spent fuel and radioactive waste. The Joint Convention also requires each party to report on the national implementation of these principles to review meetings of the parties to this Convention. This report describes the manner in which The Netherlands has fulfilled its obligations under the Joint Convention. The Netherlands has a small nuclear programme: only one nuclear power plant and a small number of research reactors are currently in operation. Consequently, both the total quantities of spent fuel and radioactive waste which have to be managed and the proportion of high-level and long-lived waste are likewise modest. Many of the radioactive waste management activities are necessarily centralized in one agency in order to take as much benefit as possible from the economy of scale. This explains why a major part of the report is devoted to the activities of COVRA, the Central Organisation for Radioactive Waste, in Borssele. This report gives an article by article review of the situation in the Netherlands, as compared with the obligations laid down in the Joint Convention. The numeration of the chapters and sections of this report correspond with those of the Joint Convention. The sequence of the articles in the joint Convention is strictly following in the description of the situation in The Netherlands. In the appendices quantitative information on the inventories of spent fuel and radioactive waste are given, representing the status at the end of 2002, as well as a detailed description of the policies underlying the present practices.