One of today¿s activities of the Joint Research Centre¿s (JRC) Institute for Energy (IE) concerns data management and dissemination in nuclear safety. An ¿Online Data & Information Network¿ (ODIN) is set-up, which maintains one document database and four engineering databases. These databases aim to deploy networks for energy related research & development, specifically for nuclear energy and to provide the public experimental data of European projects on mechanical and thermo-physical material properties in comparison with international standards and recommendations. Due to its long lasting experience and being in a key position as regards web based d-base (e.g. ODIN), the IAEA for example has recently transferred the reactor surveillance data-base to the IE.
Lately, many stakeholders, such as Institutes, R&D Organisations, Regulators, Utilities, Governmental Organisations, have recognised the need for collecting, preserving, consolidating (validating), and disseminating nuclear knowledge (documents, competences and data), in order to make it easily accessible to future generations through modern informatics tools and training and education measures. A broad spectrum of components and technologies should be considered, i.e. reactor pressure vessel (RPV), piping, internals, steam generator, etc. regarding knowledge, material data and practices. In the long run, it will also support future decommissioning exercises of nuclear installations as a valuable knowledge source. In addition to the knowledge in each Member State, the IE produced a long standing record of results from its own institutional activities and even more through the participation to a large number of European Network partnership projects.
It is important, besides preservation, to consolidate the enormous amount of scientific results produced since. Therefore, the IE has developed a method for consolidation of nuclear knowledge. The method relays on the mobilisation of all identified leading experts in the EU in re-evaluating old knowledge and consolidating what is necessary to create training materials for the new generations.
This method was applied for a pilot study for consolidating and preserving WWER RPV safety related knowledge, which is scattered in many countries and in different languages, facing a serious issue in terms of getting lost. This initiative could be the start of a wider Nuclear Knowledge Preservation and Consolidation activity. Experience gained from the first exercise will be presented in this paper.JRC.F.4-Safety of future nuclear reactor
