Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament. Decommissioning of nuclear installations and management of radioactive waste: management of nuclear liabilities arising out of the activities of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) carried out under the Euratom Treaty

The purpose of this Communication is to provide updated information on the status of the decommissioning and nuclear waste management programme (DWM programme) of nuclear installations which are managed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. The update covers the period since the last Communication (2008-2012) as well as the forecast for the future.

In the last four years, the programme has gained momentum and achieved solid progress in a number of key activities. The most significant activities of the programme are located at the JRC-Ispra site (Italy), as it hosts most of the shutdown nuclear installations of the JRC. On the other JRC nuclear sites of Karlsruhe (Germany), Petten (the Netherlands) and Geel (Belgium) the decommissioning activities are for the time being relatively limited, as all three sites have nuclear installations in operation.

JRC-Ispra has focussed on designing and building its own pre-decommissioning waste characterisation, treatment and conditioning installations at its site. The total waste volumes at JRC-Ispra after decommissioning will, once conditioned, have to be stored on-site until interim or final waste deposit sites will be available in Italy. For this reason the JRC is constructing an on-site interim storage facility. Meanwhile most of the nuclear materials which are obsolete have been either shipped off-site or are in the process of being transferred to third parties.

At the three other sites, pre-decommissioning activities have continued for the dismantling of out-of-use equipment from past research work and the removal off-site of obsolete nuclear fuel and other nuclear materials.

Since the previous Communication the risk mitigation strategy has provided several improvements related to the internal organisation as well as the signature on 27 November 2009 of a Settlement Agreement between the European Atomic Energy Community and the Italian Government.

The JRC DWM Steering Committee assesses on a regular basis the decommissioning strategies and the evolution of expenditure. The JRC also involves the DWM Group of Independent Experts that advises on the technical projects and budget estimates. An external expert evaluation conducted in 2011-2012 recognised that significant progress had been made and endorsed the updated planning of the different sites for the future execution of the DWM programme.

EUR-Lex: COM(2013)734: Follow the progress of this communication through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2013:734:FIN

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