Under application of decree n° 95-540 of 4 May 1995 concerning discharges of liquid and gaseous effluent and intake of water by BNIs, the ASN in 2005 continued to examine applications for renewal of the water intake and non-radioactive liquid effluent discharge licences for nuclear power plants. These licences, issued at prefectural level under the previous regulations in this respect, comprise a stipulated validity limit. At the request of the ASN, the applications submitted by EDF concern water intake and all discharges, be they liquid or gaseous, radioactive or non-radioactive. These dossiers are subject to a public enquiry. The ASN's goal is for most of the existing licences to be reviewed in the next few years, in order to harmonise the specifications applicable to the various sites.

The renewals currently being examined were presented by EDF as soon as the previous licences reached their expiration dates. In particular, for sites where the authorisation deadline was imminent, the ASN fixed deadlines for the submission of licensee application dossiers by a decision of 4 July 2001. Thus, at the end of 2005, eleven nuclear power plants were covered by a new effluent discharge and water intake licence. Submissions of applications for the other plants will be staggered until 2009.

These renewals enable the ASN to group in a single document all the requirements previously specified by different ministerial or prefectural orders, according to the type of discharge concerned. These requirements in particular specify the quantities, concentrations and surveillance procedures for the pollutants likely to be found in the discharges and in the environment, in accordance with the order of 26 November 1999 laying down the general technical specifications concerning the limits and sampling procedures of the discharges subject to licensing, carried out by BNIs. In this context, the ASN decided to modify the terms and conditions regulating discharge according to the following principles:

• with regard to radioactive discharges, the real discharges from NPPs are constantly falling and are well below current limit values, so the ASN is reducing these limit values. For each of the 900 and 1300 MWe plant series, it has set new limit values based on the experience feedback from real discharges, while taking account of the unexpected events occurring during routine operation of the reactors. The discharge limits have thus been cut by a factor of between 1 and nearly 40, depending on the current fuel management parameters. They have risen by a factor of 1.25 for liquid tritium discharges, assuming future high burnup fraction fuel management;
• with regard to non-radioactive substances, the ASN decided to improve on the previous discharge regulations.