JRC/IE Support Activities to PHARE Nuclear Safety Programmes: Dissemination of PHARE Project Results

Abstract

Nuclear Safety in Europe is one of the EU's primary concerns, therefore the EU decided to take a prominent role to help the New Independent States and countries of Central and Eastern Europe to ensure the safety of their nuclear reactors. The EU TACIS and PHARE programmes in nuclear safety have been undertaken since 1991. The European Commission's Directorate General External Relations (EC DG RELEX) and Directorate General EuropeAid Co-operation Office (EC DG AIDCO), are responsible for programming and management of implementation of TACIS projects. DG Enlargement (EC DG ELARG) is responsible for programming PHARE programmes, but implementation of most projects has been deconcentrated and decentralised to the Beneficiary Countries. In these activities the TSSTP Unit at the JRC/IE in Petten, The Netherlands, is the technical and scientific adviser of above mentioned EC Directorates General. Several PHARE projects aiming at improving nuclear safety have been successfully implemented for a number of plants from Central and Eastern Europe. In some cases major safety issues have been addressed by means of multi-country projects and results have been disseminated to the rest of the nuclear community. Although a lot of information has been exchanged at a bilateral level, further effort is needed to collect the project results in a systematic way and make them available by means of the internet. At present the TSSTP Unit is implementing two projects for dissemination of PHARE project results. This activity will take a better advantage of today's communication technologies and ensure the management of the acquired knowledge through preservation and user-friendly access and retrieval of the project results. The paper provides an outline of the TSSTP Unit relevant knowledge preservation initiative, a description of the web-based informatics platform used to support the dissemination of PHARE project results, and summarizes the results from the major PHARE Nuclear Safety projects.