Framework Component - Waste Management Sites and Facilities

(Background Information)

The NEWMDB is used to collect, manage and disseminate information about radioactive waste management activities and radioactive waste inventories that are located at waste management sites. For reporting to the NEWMDB, Waste Management Sites are (a) limited to those licensed under nuclear or radioactive materials regulations of the Member State and (b) include at least one facility for radioactive waste processing (treatment and/or conditioning), storage or disposal. With regards to licensing, the identified facilities could be covered under the license of another facility, such as a nuclear reactor.

To minimize the effort of reporting to the NEWMDB, a Member State might not report all Waste Management Sites. For example, in the context of the figure that follows, a Member State might only report major Waste Management Sites - it might not report each and every waste processing, storage and/or dedicated SRS management facility (such as those at hospitals, universities, and small research centres). The sites to be included/excluded from reporting and how the reporting will be structured will be based on interactions between Country Co-ordinators and the NEWMDB Programme Officer.

Member States may also choose to define a reporting structure to prepare a "rolled up" report. For example, in the first data collection cycle, both France and Germany created "national level" reports in which a single Reporting Group was defined and a single "theoretical site" was defined. As such, waste inventories, processing methods and SRS were reported for these single, theoretical sites, they were not reported on a site-by-site basis according to physical sites that actually exist in the country. This approach is acceptable for Member States that, nationally, can report "rolled up" inventories because data reported to the NEWMDB can be traced back to national level reports.

Note (the figure below is based on a figure prepared for an Agency meeting - it represents a possible reporting structure for the USA)

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The intent is to report with sufficient detail to trace back to national level waste management reports (to validate submissions to the NEWMDB) without reporting at such a high level of detail that reporting would pose an unacceptable burden to the Member State. For Member States with complex infrastructures and numerous waste management sites, the long-term objective of the NEWMDB is to eventually capture all relevant information via electronic transfer between national information systems and the NEWMDB. In the near-term, it is unacceptable to impose undue reporting burdens upon Member States...