Monitoring of geoscientific expermiments in Underground Research Laboratory – ANDRA | France

Nuclear waste 500m underground

In 1979, a national agency (ANDRA) as been established in France for managing its nuclear wastes.

In 2000, ANDRA started building at Bure (Haute-Marne/ Meuse) a 500 m deep underground laboratory for scientific experiments regarding long terms radioactive waste storage. Stability of the underground geology is a key component of the research program.

More than one hundred galleries have been dug, from -445 to -490 m, to undertake the multiple experiments ranging from hydrological, geotechnical, thermal and geochemistry.

Comprehensive remote monitoring network

Since 2001, Sixense is in charge of the design, installation and maintenance of a comprehensive remote monitoring network to support the experiments and has deployed its Geoscope platform.

This powerful system allows for scientists from ANDRA and their partners either in France or abroad getting real time data, wherever and whenever they need it.

The system also allows for storage and archiving of all the historian data, as well as alarms, procedures and attached documents.

The versatility of the platform is such that scientists have been gruadualy increasing the frequency acquisition of the various parameters to reach in 2012 the milestone of 1 million data entries per day.

The results of these experiments will enable to specify the design and regulations for the construction and operations of the long terms nuclear wastes depository scheduled to be put in service around 2025.