The project envisaged the construction of four temporary storage areas for radioactive waste ("buffer areas"), to allow for emptying any existing temporary storage facilities to bring them up to the latest safety standards, as well as the installation of a Waste Treatment Station (STR)) equipped with systems for compacting and cementing the waste produced by the plant decommissioning.
The conditioned manufactured items, with a maximum volume of 2,000 cubic metres, will be stored in the temporary storage areas, which were built in the areas below the existing
Materials Management Station (SGM) These areas, equipped with lifting systems, can also rely on fire detection and extinguishing systems as well as radiological monitoring systems.
The STR is complementary to the
SGM, already present inside the turbine building and commissioned in 2009. Its construction consisted of two main phases.
- The first phase, completed in June 2017, involved the upgrading of civil works, with the removal of resulting materials, and the removal of system interferences for the construction of the temporary storage areas for radioactive waste.
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In the second phase, which started in December 2017, the systems were properly upgraded.
- a 1,500 tonne super compactor for 220-litre standard drums
- a cementing station for 440-litre drums to house the super-compacted capsules
- a dedicated cementing station for 5.2 cubic metre prismatic containers, designed to accommodate mainly metal dismantling waste
- dynamic confinement systems
- a compacted capsule sorting system
- a technical "maturing" area, adjacent to the STR, dedicated to container storage.
The STR will allow, through compaction, a substantial reduction in the volume of legacy compactable waste produced by decommissioning activities - in particular, the dismantling of the reactor building - and, through cementing operations, the conditioning of different types of waste to make them suitable for transfer to the National Repository.