Challenges for education & training for nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation

The original pessimism of one decade ago with great concern of vanishing nuclear knowledge is turning around with the several international education and training initiatives in the nuclear field. Moreover past lessons learnt resulted in the concept of including also non-proliferation by reactor design. Nuclear safeguards is a supranational issue, for which training remained a niche for the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Europe and even with limited competition worldwide. The JRC has more than 30 year experience in providing Nuclear Safeguards courses to inspectors. Moreover the lack of safeguards in the academic curriculum of nuclear students is recently tackled by the European Safeguards Research and Development Association (ESARDA) and filled with a course hosted at JRC. For the last five years, as part of the international effort to promote nuclear knowledge, ESARDA¿s Working Group Training and Knowledge Management has been educating more than 250 young professionals and students about nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation and aim to complement nuclear engineering studies by including nuclear safeguards in the academic curriculum. The weeklong courses, with lectures from some of the leading experts in the field of nuclear safeguards, are open to masters degree students, in particular nuclear engineering students, but also to young professionals and those studying international relations and nuclear law. Fostering a two-fold technical-juridical education in the EU is compliant with one of the original roles of JRC described in the EURATOM Treaty and fits with the current view of the International Atomic Energy Agency. In order to reinforce the dwindling teaching capacity, in particular also in nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation, international collaboration is fostered with a new Working Group NUSASET (Nuclear Safeguards and Security Education and Training).

LEEK M.;  JANSSENS-MAENHOUT Greet;  DAURES Pascal;  JANSSENS Willem; 

2011-10-07

Publications Office of the European Union

JRC55854

http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC55854,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC55854,   

10.2788/26070,