ANDRA Underground Laboratory | France
Project summary
Images of the project
In 1979, ANDRA was established in France as a national agency for managing nuclear waste.
In 2000, ANDRA started building at Bure (Haute-Marne/ Meuse). ANDRA Underground Laboratory comprised a 500 m deep underground laboratory for scientific experiments regarding long term 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 445mbgl to 490mbgl, to undertake multiple experiments ranging from hydrological, geotechnical, thermal and geochemistry.
Since 2001, Sixense has been managing the design, installation and ongoing maintenance of a comprehensive remote monitoring network to support the experiments and has deployed its Geoscope platform.
The solution allows scientists from ANDRA and their partners either in France or abroad to review real-time data, wherever and whenever they need to.
The system also allows storage and archiving of all historic data, as well as alarms, procedures and attached documents.
The versatility of the platform is such that scientists have been gradualy increasing the frequency acquisition of the various parameters to eventually reach, in 2012, the milestone of 1 million data entries per day.
The results of these experiments will enable scientists to specify the design and regulations for the construction and operations of the long term nuclear waste depository scheduled to enter service around 2025.
