Quantities of waste

• intermediate-level waste (ILW) that contains a significant amount of long-lived radionuclides and thus requires a higher degree of isolation from the surrounding environment than low-level waste; and

• high-level waste (HLW), whose heat generated by the decay of the radionuclides it contains must be taken into account during its storage and disposal; after this waste is processed and treated, it must meet waste acceptance criteria and be disposed of in deep geological repositories several hundred meters underground.

QUANTITIES OF WASTE

The Czech Republic has the largest volumes of nuclear waste of any of the more recent member states in the EU. In communist times, spent nuclear fuel was returned to the supplier, the Soviet Union. Since the early 1990s, however, Russia has no longer accepted returned nuclear waste. ČEZ, the operator of the Czech nuclear power plants, built dry cask storage facilities at its plants to store spent fuel after it had been removed from the spent fuel pool. There are two dry storage facilities the Dukovany plant and one at Temelín with a total capacity of 3,310 tons of spent fuel.

The Czech government regularly publishes a waste inventory. The data below comes from the most recent inventory, which records waste volumes and activity as of December 31, 2016.

TABLE 9: Nuclear waste in the Czech Republic as of December 31, 2016

Type of waste

SNF (HLW) Type of storage

Interim storage (dry)

Interim storage (wet)

Storage site Quantity

Dukovany and Temelín 1,174 tHM

Dukovany and Temelín 654 tHM

LILW LIQUID

LILW SOLID

Reactor storage tanks Dukovany and Temelín 1,439 m³

Reactor storage facility Dukovany and Temelín 351,3 t

Near-Surface repository (disposed) Dukovany 11,520 m³

VLLW

n.a.

Source: Czech State Office for Nuclear Safety report to EURATOM 2018

Low- and intermediate-level waste produced by nuclear plants and research reactors is mostly treated on site; liquid waste is either bituminized or polymerized, whereas solid waste is either compacted or first incinerated before being compacted into 200 liter canisters. Intermediate-level waste unsuitable for deposition now is stored and will be deposited in the deep geological depository.

The government estimates that after 40 years of operation of the Dukovany and Temelín plants nearly 3,500 tons of spent fuel would be produced.293 Every additional year of operation would produce another 35 tons of waste from Dukovany and 36 from Temelín. If three additional reactors were built, nearly 10,000 tons of spent fuel would need to be disposed of by mid-22nd century. In addition to spent fuel, this repository would also need to hold 4,200 tons of waste from decommissioned nuclear plants, 140 tons of operating waste, and 84 tons of other waste.