Safeguards for spent nuclear fuel in transfer from wet storage todry storage in on-site interim storage facilities

摘要

Germany initially planned to store spent nuclear fuel in the two away-from-reactor interim storagefacilities built at Ahaus and Gorleben. The current approach for spent fuel management is on-site interim storagein transport and storage casks as part of a political agreement between the German government and the nuclearoperators on the future use of nuclear energy. A reason for this is to avoid near term transportation of spent fueldetermined for direct final disposal via public road or rail systems to away-from-reactor storage facilities. Recentlegislation has triggered the construction of 12 on-site dry storage facilities at nuclear power plants. Currently,such facilities are being taken into operation on a step-by-step basis. There is a strong need to develop acceptablesafeguards concepts for both transfer and dry storage of spent fuel, ideally, a standard safeguards concept thatwould match all German nuclear power plant sites without ignoring technical and organisational differences. Thepaper will address the relevant issues and give an overview of the status of safeguards implementation.