Reversibility and Retrievability in Planning for Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste-Proceedings of the "R&R" International Conference and Dialogue, December 14-17, 2010, Reims, France

In 2007 the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Radioactive Waste Management Committee
(RWMC) launched a four-year project on the topics of reversibility and retrievability in geological
disposal. The goal of the project studies and activities (www.oecd-nea.org/rwm/rr) was to
acknowledge the range of approaches to reversibility and retrievability (R&R), rather than to
recommend a specific approach, and to provide a basis for reflection rather than to lead towards
a particular conclusion. The NEA Working Group on Reversibility and Retrievability enjoyed
participation from 15 countries and 2 international organisations. The project benefited from
exchanges among an ever-widening group of interested parties that culminated in the
International Conference and Dialogue on Reversibility and Retrievability in Planning for
Geological Disposal of Radioactive Waste held in Reims, France, in December 2010.
The members of the R&R project prepared the three-day conference and dialogue in order to
open the discussions to a larger audience. The objectives of the conference included allowing
and recording as many points of view as possible, discussing and better understanding
commonalities and differences, testing and refining the findings of the draft NEA R&R project
report, and refining the international R-scale, a tool for dialogue that has been developed within
the framework of the NEA R&R project.
The event was open to all interested parties and featured participation from civil society
stakeholders, implementers and scientific researchers, regulators, policy makers and social
scientists. Some 180 persons attended, making or hearing plenary presentations, and dialoguing
in breakout round-table sessions.
Among the key points that emerged were:
• The development of any geological repository for radioactive waste will take place over
many decades and should be open to progress in science and technology, to evolving
societal demands and to fixing potential implementation errors. In this regard, selecting
technologies that are as reversible as possible is a prudent approach. There is interest in
a number of countries to show that retrieval of the waste is feasible during the period of
waste emplacement or even during a certain period after closure of the repository.
• While countries differ in their plans to study retrieval before or after closure of a repository,
the Retrievability Scale developed by the NEA R&R project is a useful communication tool
across contexts. It shows that even if geological disposal is intrinsically a reversible
technology, ease of retrieval through the various stages of repository implementation can
only be a matter of degree.
• There is strong societal interest in reversibility of decisions or retrievability of waste,
as indicated by legal provisions in many countries. In France, for instance, reversibility
is at the core of the current technical and societal debate framed by its stepwise waste
management process. There is universal agreement, however, that R&R provisions are
never to interfere with long-term safety. R&R only add value to a final management
solution that rests on passive safety.
• Reversibility of decisions and retrievability of waste are complex subjects that cannot be
considered in isolation from safety and societal issues. Further reflection and dialogue
are needed, in particular to harmonise vocabulary and to define key terms such as “disposal”, “storage”, “waste” and “closure”. Because there is no “one size fits all”, each
concept should be adapted to its national context.
These proceedings contain the conference presentations, the reports from the round-table
sessions and the poster abstracts. All are published under the responsibility of their authors.