NUCLEAR SAFETY

The list of all Nuclear Safety documents produced since 1973 is now available at www.oecd-nea.org/nsd/docs/indexcsni.html

Two important meetings related to NEA nuclear safety activities were held at the end of 1999:

The 11th Meeting of the Committee on Regulatory Activities on November 29-30 1999, and the 27th Meeting of the Committee on Safety of Nuclear Istallations (CSNI) on December 1 - 3, 1999.

The main purpose of both meetings was to review the activities carried out by these Committees in 1999 and to approve the activities proposed for the year 2000. In total more than 40 reports and technical opinion papers were produced and a number of workshops were held in this area 1999.

One of the most important outcomes of the CSNI meeting was the approval of the CSNI Strategic Plan www.oecd-nea.org/nsd/reports/2000/csni-r2000-3.pdf . The reasons for developing the Plan were to ensure that the work of the CSNI is aligned with the NEA Strategic Plan, and to maximise the efficiency of its work in view of the decreasing R&D budgets in Member countries. The basic objectives to be achieved by the plan are better top-down direction of the programme of work, and maintenance of an effective network of technical experts.

The plan specifies a new CSNI mission and identified the strategic areas of future activities. In addition, the plan included a number of organisational recommendations, such as:

· The CSNI should meet twice a year.
· A Programme Review Group (PRG) should be established to assist the bureau.
· The Principal Working Groups (PWGs) should be renamed Working Groups (WGs) and their number decreased from five to four. A WG on Analysis and Management of Accidents is to replace the existing PWG-2 and PWG-4.
· The Fuel Cycle Safety Group should become a Task Group (TG) of the WG on Operating Experience (formerly PWG-1).
· The existing PWG-3 and PWG-5 should continue essentially unchanged.
· Two Special Expert Groups (SEGs) should be created out of the existing sub groups, namely a group on Fuel Safety Margins and one on Human and Organisational Factors.
· The guidelines documented in the CSNI Strategic Plan should be used to identify and approve the work to be performed by the CSNI.

Both Committees approved a number of a workshops and seminars to be organised in future:

· CSNI Workshop on Instrumentation and Monitoring of Concrete Structures, Brussels, March 22-23, 2000

· CSNI Workshop on Advanced Thermal-hydraulic and Neutronic Codes, Current and Future Applications, Barcelona, April 10-13, 2000.

· Safety of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle, 29th to 31st May 2000, Japan, Joint Workshop with CSNI, CNRA, CRPPH, and NSC

· CSNI Specialist Meeting on Safety Performance Indicators, Madrid, Spain, October 17-19, 2000

· CSNI Workshop on Errors of Commission in Probabilistic Safety Assessment, November 2000, United States

· CNRI Workshop on Investing in Trust: Nuclear Regulators and the Public, Paris, 29 November-1 December 2000

· CSNI Workshop on Human Reliability Data Base (HRAD), Spring 2001, Europe

· CSNI Workshop on Precursor Analysis, Spring 2001, Europe

OECD-IPSN CABRI Water Loop Project

The initiation of the OECD-IPSN CABRI Water Loop Project was marked by a meeting held in Paris on 3 December 1999. Representatives from ten Member countries attended the meeting to discuss different aspects of the international agreement that will constitute the basis for the project administration. The Project addresses key issues related to the extended utilisation of nuclear fuel in nuclear power plants, in particular concerning the fuel integrity in postulated accidental conditions. The experimental programme, consisting of twelve tests carried out in the CABRI facility in Cadarache, France, will be conducted by the French Institut de Protection et de Surete Nucleaire (IPSN) as operating agent and under the sponsorship of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. Significant modifications of the CABRI facility are foreseen in order to obtain optimal conditions for the intended experiments, to be performed between 2001 and 2007.

NUCLEAR LAW

Back issues of the Nuclear Law Bulletin (Numbers 1-60), in English and French, are now available in .pdf format on the NEA Web site, in English at: www.oecd-nea.org/law/nlb/index.html and in French at: www.oecd-nea.org/law/nlbfr/index.html.
You may view these files using Adobe Acrobat Reader. Future editions of the Nuclear Law Bulletin/Bulletin de droit nucléaire will be made available on the Web site approximately one year after their publication.

NEA Data Bank

Subject: The Fourth International Conference on Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications: SNA 2000 September 4-7, 2000, TORANOMON-PASTORAL, Tokyo, Japan Sponsored by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute and Co-sponsored by OECD/Nuclear Energy Agency, Atomic Energy Society of Japan, Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute. Objectives:

(1) present the newest research results in numerical simulations in a wide variety of scientific and engineering fields, in particular nuclear and its related fields.
(2) promote and encourage the introduction of supercomputing technologies to numerical simulations. Some of the sessions will be organized so that researchers in numerical simulations and high performance computing fields can engage in discussing common areas of interest. Contributions generally focus on large-scale numerical simulations in application fields and supercomputing technologies. Papers on computational science and engineering simulations, whether they are small or large scale, are welcome.

For detailed information please visit the following Web page: http://wwwndc.jaea.go.jp/Mtgs/2000/index00.html.

Chemical Thermodynamic Data

The OECD/NEA TDB project is proud to present the book "Chemical Thermodynamics of Technetium", the third in the series of TDB reviews. This review book is available here. For further information about this, please visit the TDB web site under www.oecd-nea.org/dbtdb/pubs/publications.html

The selected data are also available in electronic form at the TDB web site www.oecd-nea.org/dbtdb/tdbdata/tdbdata.html
A lot of work has gone into the production of this volume, and we hope you will find it useful

The addresses etc. of those of you who have signed up for early ordering via mail or the TDB web site has been sent to the publisher, and you should receive pro-forma invoices in the near future.

This message was sent to you from the tdb-announce mailing list. This is a low-volume (around five messages per year) mailing list announcing important news about the OECD/NEA Thermochemical Data Base (TDB) project. If you do not wish to receive messages from this mailing list, send mail to tdb-announce-request@oecd-nea.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the subject line of the message. This will automatically remove you from the mailing list.

New software packages available from the Data Bank:
A page giving the list of all new programs in the last 12 months can be found at www.oecd-nea.org/tools/abstract/new .

27-JAN-2000 NEA-0461 STAPRE,MULTIGRP_X-SEC FOR NUCL_REACTN BY EVAPORATION_MODEL & GAMMA_CASCADES (Arrived)
25-JAN-2000 NEA-1080 FEMAXI,THERM & MECH BEHAV OF LWR FUEL RODS (Arrived)
20-JAN-2000 NEA-1209 DWBA,DWBA NUCL_MODEL CALC INCLUDING NON-LOCAL POTENTIALS (Arrived)
18-JAN-2000 NEA-1534 MESYST,SIMULATION OF 3D TRACER DISPERSION IN ATMOSPHERE (Arrived)
12-JAN-2000 NEA-1617 ZZ SIESTA,ATMOSPHERIC DISPERSION EXPERIMENT OVER COMPLEX TERRAIN  (Tested)
12-JAN-2000 NEA-1618 ZZ ORESUND,NORDIC MESOSCALE DISPERSION EXP. OVER LAND-WATER-LAND  (Tested)
10-JAN-2000 PSR-0330 STARCODES,STOPPING_POWER & RANGES FOR ELECTRONS,PROTONS,HE (Arrived)
05-JAN-2000 NEA-1612 PIN99W,MODELLING OF VVER AND PWR FUEL ROD THERMOMECHANICAL BEHAVIOUR (Arrived)

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