Fusion Engineering and Design 83 (2008) 928–935 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Fusion Engineering and Design journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fusengdes Goals, challenges, and successes of managing fusion activated materials L. El-Guebaly a,∗ , V. Massaut b , K. Tobita c , L. Cadwallader d a University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Engineering Drive, Room 431, Madison, WI 53706-1687, USA b SCK CEN, Belgian Nuclear Research Center, Belgium c Japan Atomic Energy Agency, Ibaraki, Japan d Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID, USA article info Article history: Available online 14 July 2008 Keywords: Fusion radwaste management Recycling Clearance: Fusion power plant abstract After decades of designing magnetic and inertial fusion power plants, it is timely to develop a new framework for managing the activated (and contaminated) materials that will be generated during plant operation and after decommissioning—a framework that takes into account the lessons learned from numerous international fusion and fission studies and the environmental, political, and present reality in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. This will clearly demonstrate that designers developing fusion facilities will be dealing with the back end of this type of energy production from the beginning of the concep- tual design of power plants. It is becoming evident that future regulations for geological burial will be upgraded to assure tighter environmental controls. Along with the political difficulty of constructing new repositories worldwide, the current reality suggests reshaping all aspects of handling the continual stream of fusion active materials. Beginning in the mid 1980s and continuing to the present, numerous fusion designs examined replacing the disposal option with more environmentally attractive approaches, redi- recting their attention to recycling and clearance while continuing the development of materials with low activation potential. There is a growing international effort in support of this new trend. In this paper, recent history is analyzed, a new fusion waste management scheme is covered, and possibilities for how its prospects can be improved are examined. Published by Elsevier B.V. 1. Introduction Since the inception of the fusion projects in the early 1970s, the majority of power plant designs have focused on the disposal of active materials in geological repositories as the main option for handling the replaceable and life-of-plant components, adopting the preferred fission waste management approach of the 1960s. Now, after ∼40 year experience in designing fusion power plants, it is timely to think of a new framework to handle the sizable volume of activated materials (AM) that fusion will generate during opera- tion and after decommissioning. Concerns about the environment, radwaste burden for future generations, lack of geological reposi- tories, and high disposal cost directed our attention to recycling of the AM (for reuse within the nuclear industry) and clearance (the unconditional release to the commercial market or disposal in a non-nuclear landfill). In fact, the recycling and clearance options have been investigated by fusion researchers in the late 1980s and 1990s, focusing on selected materials or components [1–3], then examining almost all fusion components in the late 1990s ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 608 263 1623; fax: +1 608 263 4499. E-mail address: elguebaly@engr.wisc.edu (L. El-Guebaly). and 2000s [4–7]. Recycling and clearance became more techni- cally feasible with the development of advanced radiation-resistant remote handling (RH) tools that can recycle highly irradiated mate- rials [8,9] and with the introduction of the clearance category for slightly radioactive materials by national and international nuclear agencies [10,11]. Such recent advances encouraged many fusion designers [9,12–16] to apply recycling and clearance to all fusion components that are subject to extreme radiation lev- els: very high levels near the plasma and very low levels at the bioshield. Fusion power cores generate a sizable volume of AM relative to fission reactors. To put matters into perspective, we com- pared ITER, the advanced ARIES tokamak (ARIES-AT), the European Power Plant Conceptual Study (PPCS-Model-C), the Japanese VEC- TOR tokamak, and a compact stellarator (ARIES-CS) to ESBWR (Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor)—a Gen-III + advanced fission reactor. Fig. 1 displays the notable difference in sizes and a typical classification into high-level waste (HLW), low-level waste (LLW). Surrounding the fusion power core is the bioshield, a 2–3 m thick steel-reinforced concrete building. Its volume dom- inates the waste stream. Since burying such a huge volume of slightly activated materials in geological repositories is imprac- tical, the US-NRC and IAEA suggested the clearance concept 0920-3796/$ – see front matter. Published by Elsevier B.V. doi:10.1016/j.fusengdes.2008.05.025