Context
Alongside the production of intermediate or final goods, industrial processes necessarily generate by-products. Recovering and recycling these by-products is one of the economic concerns of industrialists, just as it is part of their environmental responsibility to neutralise their harmful nature and dispose of any waste that cannot be recovered in landfill sites. Neutralising the toxicity of this waste is not always an easy task, and this concern applies both to non-recoverable production residues and to the very facilities that produced them when they are obsolete and so impregnated that they cannot be completely cleaned.
On all these points, the nuclear power industry is no exception. In Europe, around a hundred nuclear reactors are currently shut down. Dismantling them will generate large volumes of materials, some of them radioactive. The largest volumes will be very low-level waste (VLLW). The management of these dismantling products is therefore a major challenge, creating pressure on the recovery channels for these materials and on the capacity of storage facilities for those classified in the institutional category of ultimate TFA waste.
The project proposes to examine the role of information in the categorisation and management of this waste: how is information on dismantling waste, which is by its very nature extremely diverse, currently produced, circulated, used, understood or contested? How is waste measured, qualified, standardised, given value and practised by the various players in the dismantling sector?