nuclear safety Articles
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On nuclear training and education prospering from the EURATOM Treaty
This paper describes the past and present status of nuclear (safeguards) education and training activities undertaken jointly in the European Commission's Research Centre. Starting from the original training requests formulated in the EURATOM Treaty, it is explained how the Joint Nuclear Research Centre (JRC) originally started to develop nuclear courses. Whereas nuclear safety is a national ...
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ISO 9001 or IAEA GS-R-3?
This article identifies, characterises and analyses International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) normative requirements for the development and implementation of quality management systems in nuclear organisations. The applicable standards are identified and their requirements are characterised and reviewed. The correspondence and correlation ...
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Building and maintaining a knowledge-sharing culture for nuclear knowledge transfer
This article highlights the problem of lack of willingness to share knowledge in nuclear organisations. This occurrence is widely common for different entities and business fields. The nuclear industry and nuclear power plant operating companies are not an exception. Knowledge may be considered as power, but in the context of an ageing workforce and the human resource shortage in the nuclear ...
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Nuclear knowledge management and preservation in Lithuania
Problems of nuclear knowledge management and preservation in Lithuania are presented in the paper. The support provided through bilateral cooperation projects was very important for Lithuania. The main projects implemented in the last 14 years are described in this paper. Lithuania joined INIS (International Nuclear Information System) in 1994 and established its own INIS national centre in the ...
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A new world governance for nuclear safety after Fukushima?
Over several decades of operation of nuclear power plants, the world nuclear community has built progressively an international regime to govern the safety of such plants. Starting from a time when nuclear safety was generally considered as an exclusive domestic responsibility, the evolution in this direction has been slow and uneven. Accidents have had to serve as a catalyst to mitigate the ...
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Assuring nuclear safety education in the twenty-first century in Sweden
One of the most critical challenges in the future for nuclear technology is to maintain nuclear competence. In this paper, the work to cope with this challenge in Sweden is described. The main measure has been the cooperation between the authorities and the nuclear power industry in the Swedish Centre for Nuclear Technology. In the year 2002, its activity only to support PhD students was expanded ...
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Convention on Nuclear Safety: lessons learned after the third round of review meetings
As the Convention on Nuclear Safety was adopted in mid-1994 and came into existence in late 1996, and because the third review meeting has recently been organised, an attempt to draw some conclusions is justifiable. The Convention is an instrument of incentive character, and Slovenia understands the interface between the review process and national reports as a lesson learned and a ...
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Knowledge management practices applied within a TSO: the role of technical responsibility centres
In this paper, we point out the crucial role of a 'Community–of–Practices' (COP) for a knowledge intensive organisation as a Technical Safety Organisation (TSO) in the nuclear field. These COPs, called Technical Responsibility Centres (TRCs) within the Belgian TSO, are non–hierarchical networks of typically 36 experts, active in a well–defined technical domain. The paper shows the strong impact ...
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Harmonisation of safety rules: can existing nuclear power plants be forced to comply with new requirements?
This paper, based on a survey in nine countries, deals with the way in which different countries impose new requirements on existing nuclear power plants. This is a question that will often arise when national regulations are revised in a process of international harmonisation. It will be shown that new requirements can be divided into three categories with different justifications and different ...
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Managing nuclear knowledge in a developing country: Pakistan's perspective
The nuclear technology base in a developing country is relatively much smaller compared to those in the industrialised countries. Thus, nuclear knowledge and its management are of great importance for those countries which are interested in nuclear technology but are still in the development phase. It is neither desirable nor possible to use imported nuclear technology as a black box. It is ...
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Incident in the Forsmark 1 nuclear power plant in 2006 and knowledge breakdowns
The incident in Forsmark nuclear plant in 2006 can be seen not merely as a failure of technology or safety culture but as a failure of knowledge. A previous study of the chain of events that led to the incident revealed that the recent modernisation activities in the plant had led to striking gaps in knowledge and the introduction of flaws. This paper aims to analyse the exact mechanisms ...
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The Russian approach to nuclear liability
This paper gives a view of the challenges of nuclear liability in the specific context of the Russian Federation's legal system. Starting from the Chernobyl disaster and the benefits of nuclear energy, a detailed examination of the development of both internal law and international law regulating nuclear liability matters in Russia is given. Special attention is paid to the regimes established by ...
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A hybrid model to deal with missing values in nuclear safeguards' evaluation
Nuclear safeguards' evaluation aims to verify countries not misusing nuclear programmes for nuclear weapon purposes. This is a complex process in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) uses information from different available sources. Initially, the research was focused on developing the evaluation framework to handle the complexity of the safeguards' evaluation and the uncertainty ...
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Education for the nuclear power industry: Swedish perspective
In the Swedish nuclear power industry staff, very few newly employed have a deep education in reactor technology. To remedy this, a joint education company, Nuclear Training and Safety Center (KSU), has been formed. To ensure that nuclear competence will be available also in a long-term perspective, the Swedish nuclear power industry and the Swedish Nuclear Power Inspectorate (SKI) have formed a ...
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Multi-objective optimisation of the fuel element plate of an Egyptian research reactor using genetic algorithms
The Second Egyptian Research Nuclear Reactor, ET-RR-2, went critical on 27 November 1997. The National Center of Nuclear Safety and Radiation Control has the responsibility of evaluating and assessing the safety of this reactor. The purpose of this paper is to present an approach to the optimisation of the Fuel Element (FE) plate. For an efficient search through the solution space, we use a ...
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Failure possibilities for nuclear safety assessment by fault tree analysis
Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a deductive tool to assess the safety of nuclear power plants. This analysis can only be implemented if all basic events in the tree have their corresponding failure rates. Therefore, safety analysts have to provide those failure rates well in advance. However, it is often difficult to obtain those failure rates due to insufficient data, changing environment or new ...
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Safety analysis of a VVER-440 spent fuel storage pool
Numerical analysis has been carried out for the spent fuel pools of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), where the fuel assemblies are stored for several years after discharge from the reactor. The performed calculations covered both severe and design basis accidents. The results indicated that the spent fuel pool accidents may have severe consequences. For this reason new procedures have been ...
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Evaluation of the programme for long–term operation for safety requirements during operational safety
The programme for long–term operation (LTO) in the nuclear power plant (NPP) installations is one of the essential nuclear safety concerns. It may be defined as an operation beyond an established time frame set forth by, for example, licence term, design, standards, licence and/or regulations, which has been justified by safety assessment, with consideration given to life–limiting processes and ...
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Dynamical safety assessment of hydrogen production nuclear power plants using system dynamics method
Nuclear power plants for hydrogen production are investigated in the aspect of nuclear safety. The non–linear dynamical safety assessment is introduced for the analysis of the high temperature gas cooled reactor (HTGR) which is used for hydrogen production as well as electricity generation. The dynamical algorithm is adjusted for the safety assessment with an easier and reliable output. A ...
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Justification of the continued development of the peaceful use of nuclear energy
The argument for justification of the nuclear electric power development is examined in the following terms: practicability, economic and new build-up; effects on health; safety; security; the environment; issues and opportunities to overcome barriers to its development are identified. Uncertainties are identified in the areas of health and security that must be acknowledged and tackled from an ...
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