This chapter deals in a general way with management of objects and sites after they have been used for an activity involving radioactive substances, when their owner intends to abandon them or wishes to alter their utilisation.

This chapter therefore deals with:
- how radioactive waste is managed in operational activities;
- how clean-up of sites and installations is regulated, to prevent pollution;
- how past or current pollution (polluted sites) is dealt with to guarantee protection of the environment and the public.

Finally, certain installations designed for radioactive waste disposal concentrate intentionally radioactivity in a single place; how the surrounding public and environment are protected falls within the domain of waste repository safety, which must be dealt consistently with polluted site practices.

Like any human activity, nuclear activities produce waste. This waste is of two types, depending on whether or not it can be considered liable to have been contaminated by radionuclides. Waste containing high levels of natural radioactivity, sometimes resulting from use of a process leading to concentration of this radiation, can be produced by non-nuclear activities, in which the radioactive substances are not used for their radioactive or fissile properties.

Certain industrial waste, considered to be hazardous, must be managed in specific channels.

Radioactive waste management begins with the design of installations using radioactive substances, and proceeds during the operating life of these installations through concern for limitation of the volume of waste produced, of its harmfulness and of the quantity of residual radioactive materials contained. It continues through identification, sorting, treatment, packaging, transport and interim storage and final disposal. All operations associated with management of a category of waste, from production to disposal, constitute a waste management channel, each of which must be appropriate to the type of waste concerned.

The operations within each channel are interlinked and all the channels are interdependent. These operations and channels form a system which has to be optimised in the context of an overall approach to radioactive waste management addressing safety, radiation protection, traceability and volume reduction issues. This management must also be completely transparent to the public.

Radioactive wastes vary considerably by their activity level, their half-lives, their volume or even their nature (scrap metal, rubble, oils, etc.). The treatment and long-term management solution must be appropriate to the type of waste in order to overcome the risk involved, notably radiological hazards.

The latter can be assessed on the basis of two main parameters: the activity level, which contributes to the toxicity of the waste, and the radioactive half-life, which depends on the radioactive decay periods of the radioelements it contains. Therefore, on the one hand we have very low, low, intermediate or high level waste and, on the other hand, waste known as very short-lived, resulting mainly from medical activities (activity level halved in less than 100 days), short-lived (activity level halved in less than 30 years) and long-lived, containing a large quantity of long-lived radioelements (activity level halved in more than 30 years).

The table below shows the stage reached in implementation of the different waste management channels, notably the final disposal channel adopted. It shows that for certain waste, there is at present no final disposal solution.