#	Pagina
attuale pagina	/open-h2020/projects/208322/results.html

Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENTRUST (Building trust in nuclear waste management through participatory quantitative story telling)

Teaser

Summary

The project ENTRUST is coordinated by Amphos 21 Consulting S.L. located in Barcelona, Spain, in collaboration with Stanford Universityâ€™s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in California, USA. It examines the general question of how to manage in the long term the growing stocks of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW) produced at commercial power plants in a context of uncertain transitions and persisting societal concerns over nuclear energy technologies. The project comprises scientific and training objectives. The main scientific objective is to develop an analytical framework for the holistic assessment of nuclear waste management (NWM) scenarios and policies with the objective of building and maintaining public trust.

Work performed

To that aim, the researcher designed and developed several analytical tools supporting the integrated assessment of NWM strategies: (1) a comprehensive bibliometric analytical tool to study the scholarly and scientific literature about nuclear waste since 1940; (2) a multi-criteria evaluation tool for the comparison of long-term SNF storage options; (3) a calculation and data visualization tool to evaluate possible locations of interim storage and disposal facilities for SNF; and (4) a multi-criteria evaluation tool used to compare different disposal strategies by comparing the relative performance of sites at the level of their geological environment properties. The approach is part of recent efforts toward the integration of the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The back-end integration accounts for the various processes of NWMâ€”onsite storage, consolidated storage, transport and geological disposal. These processes must be fully coupled so that benefits and impacts can be assessed at the level of the whole fuel cycle and for the different social actors. The tools developed during this project support that aim by allowing the evaluation of NWM systems at any point in the system (storage, transport, disposal). The tools have been initially developed in the context of the U.S. NWM program during the outgoing phase and will be applied to some EU countries during the return phase. To support the scientific objectives of the project, the researcher went through an extensive training program on the technical and scientific basis of NWM. The training program consisted in auditing classes, reviewing the scientific literature, participating to workshops/conferences, and interviewing experts in the many fields relevant to the technical and social aspects of NWM.

Final results

As of the end of the first phase, the research activities of this project have led to several publications, including two scientific articles, two conference papers, one book chapter and one commentary. During the return phase, the ER will focus on transferring the research innovations of this project to the NWM strategies and policies of EU countries.