Fennovoima is Finland’s third nuclear power company founded in 2007. Fennovoima will build a new nuclear power plant, Hanhikivi 1, in Pyhäjoki municipality located in Northern Finland. Currently Fennovoima is evaluating bids from reactor suppliers. Originally two suppliers, AREVA and Toshiba Heavy Industries were invited to bid for the plant but later also a bid from Rosatom were invited. The plant supplier will be selected in 2013. Platom is a Finnish company with extensive experience in radioactive waste management. In the beginning of 2008, Platom was assigned by Fennovoima as radioactive waste management consultant and to develop radioactive waste management strategy and to support Fennovoima in negotiations with plant suppliers in waste management aspects.
Since Fennovoima has started, there have been some changes to the regulatory requirements which had to be taken into account while developing the strategy. One important change is due to the Government Degree 27.11.2008/736 which establishes a new waste category of very low-level waste following international development and the “new” IAEA waste classification. Other important change was introduced by the change 342/2008 to the Nuclear Energy Act allowing some nuclear waste to be delivered to another country for treatment. These and many more requirements had to be considered when developing the strategy.
Early work by Platom was mostly done to support development of application for Decision-in-Principle. This was the first important licensing step for Fennovoima. Work started with studies and plans which were used by Fennovoima to gather the know-how required to draw up the application. Descriptions of waste streams and waste management technologies were developed as well as preliminary waste inventories and studies for final disposal, including preliminary dimensioning of the repository facilities. Based on these plans nuclear regulator’s preliminary safety assessment was performed. The work was successfully completed as in 2010 the Government of Finland granted Fennovoima a permit to build a new nuclear power plant.
The work continued in 2012 when bids were received for EPR and ABWR type reactors. Plans developed earlier were elaborated into a detailed strategy and the proposed waste management solutions were evaluated. This allowed feedback from the bids into the strategy and to the bid specification and they both were developed. Also waste inventories were elaborated which allowed development of reactor design specific disposal strategies.
The main objective of work has been to establish basis for safe and efficient radioactive waste management which meets all the relevant national and international recommendations, requirements and regulations, takes advantage of best available and state-of-art technologies and offers fit-for-purpose solutions. All the work was performed to accommodate requirement based management system.
