Cyclife France
Cyclife France in brief
Location: Cyclife France is located at the Centraco industrial site at Codolet (in the Gard department).
Employees: 310-staff
A wholly owned subsidiary of Cyclife Groupe EDF, Cyclife France has been designing, financing, building and operating facilities for the treatment and recovery of industrial waste and materials with very low to intermediate levels of radioactivity for the past 25 years.
- Cyclife France also has a 51% shareholding in Conditionnement Déchets Béton (CDB), a firm specialising in concrete containers.
- Cyclife France has been certified to ISO 14001 since 2003.
In 2018, monitoring results indicated that activity releases into the air and water were well below the authorised limits.
In 2018, Cyclife France contributed to economic activity at local and regional level via purchases worth €54m from suppliers (28% in Occitania, 22% in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, and 9% in Rhône-Alpes).
Local taxes (nuclear facilities tax, Local Economic Contribution, property tax and IRSN (Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety) tax) totalled €3.4m.
*OHSAS: Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Services (workplace health and safety management system).
More than 95,000 tons of radioactive waste have been processed in its melting and incineration furnaces in the last 20 years. The incineration unit is equipped with several preparation workshops and a furnace for safe incineration of solid waste (plastic, paper, textiles, wood, ...) and liquid waste (oils and aqueous solutions). Cyclife France can process up to 6,000 tons of waste a year, thereby reducing waste volumes by 95%. The foundry unit is fitted with a cutting workshop for large metal components. Once waste is sorted and cut to size, it is placed in a 4 ton capacity induction furnace. The molten metal is turned into ingots. These operations reduce waste volumes by 90%. Some of this metallic waste can be recycled in the form of integrated radiological shielding, used for conditioning other types of nuclear waste.
And to continuously improve its response to customer needs, Cyclife France has designed in partnership with EDF a range of mobile treatment and conditioning machines tailored for every type of radioactive waste, for deployment on customer production sites:
- MERCURE: conditioning of the ion-exchange resins in pressurised water reactor primary circuits
- UMIS: a turnkey mobile controlled area, replicating a nuclear safety containment system for purposes of container inspections, ensuring compliance of containers storing bulk waste
- UMC: immobilisation of radioactive concentrates
- UM2B: immobilisation of radioactive sludge generated by operating nuclear power plants