The NEA Working Party on Technical, Environmental and Safety Aspects of Decommissioning and Legacy Management (WPTES) aims to address technical, environmental and safety issues in the decommissioning of nuclear installations and legacy management. To address the broad scope of cross-cutting issues, the WPTES incorporates areas such as risk impacts (worker, public, environment safety), sampling and characterisation, decontamination and decommissioning technologies, decommissioning waste streams/roots, post operational clean-out, and innovative techniques (e.g. robotics, digitalisation, etc.).
The activities of WPTES are grouped around four thematic focus areas:
- Risk management to support decision making
- Understand good practices with respect to risk assessment methods for short-term and long-term risks associated with decommissioning and legacy management.
- Propose methods to optimise overall risk reduction and analyses that could be used to inform decision making based on risk assessments and other information.
- Sampling, characterisation and data evaluation
- Identify technologies for radiological and site characterisation.
- Develop methodologies for survey design to demonstrate compliance with release criteria.
- Identify data analysis and management tools to assist with conceptual site model development, survey design, remediation, and demonstration of compliance.
- Materials management
- Identify good practices to reduce volume of waste for disposal.
- Identify good practices with respect to clearance, reuse and recycling of radioactively contaminated materials.
- Identify good practices for handling, packaging and onsite storage of waste.
- Identify potential onsite and offsite disposal options.
- Innovative decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) technologies
- Identify promising technologies that could be used to facilitate D&D.
- Identify challenges to use new D&D technologies including need for testing and validation of technologies, regulatory acceptance of technologies, development of guidance.
More information about the current mandate for WPTES:
WPTES Mandate
