Hans Codee, former Director General of COVRA explains how radioactive waste is managed in a safe and sustainable way in the Netherlands:

COVRA stands for central organisation for radioactive waste and we are the waste management organisation in the Netherlands for all the radioactive waste that is generated in our country.
It means that we collect it at the sites of production: in hospitals where they work with radioactive materials, in research centres and also in the nuclear power plant in Borsele. We collect the waste there and bring it to our facility and ultimately we bring it into a form that can be stored for a period of at least hundred years. The main goal with the radioactive waste is that you keep the radioactive materials in a place where you can control it. The radioactivity will decay and so if the material has decayed completely in a place where the radiation doesn't hram you, that's the end of your problem.
We know that this can take a very long time for some radioactive materials. It can take ten thousands hundred thousands of years, so for this materials you will need another solution after a long period of storage and that is deep underground disposal.
In the Netherlands, we only have a small amount of waste and that is why we have decided to store the waste at least for hundred years, so that we can wait for future developments and these developments might be that there is new scientific work, which means that we can do something different with the material, but it can also mean that we can have an international repository, that we are going to bring the materials of various European countries down in one repository.

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