Back end of Indian nuclear fuel cycle-A road to sustainability

For immobilization (vitrification) of the waste 'Sodium borosilicate glass' composition is deployed. Vitrification facilities on Industrial scale are in operation at Tarapur and Kalpakkam. To take care of the decay heat in the vitrified products, the waste is stored in intermediate storage for about thirty o forty years. The storage vault for interim storage has been designed, constructed and is operational at Tarapur and similar higher capacity facility is under construction at Kalpakam. A solvent extraction based plant for the recovery of 137Cs has been operated and radio cesium recovered has been converted into vitrified irradiation pencils. Vitrified high-level waste volumes currently generated and stored are not sufficient to call for setting up of a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF) immediately. Based on the projected growth in nuclear power profile for India (∼54 GWe by year 2032), vitrified waste cumulatively produced and interimly stored for cooling till 2075, would only thereafter call for their economic transfer to GDF for the final disposal in a phased manner. In this paper, the technological and innovative details of the above aspects are presented.