Workshop on Developing Safety Cases for Various Radioactive Waste Disposal Facilities – Needs and Challenges of RWMC Organisations

At the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, radioactive waste management implementers have the full responsibility to ensure the safety of different waste management disposal options or processes. The implementers conduct thorough safety assessments which support decision making and form the core of a safety case in demonstrating safety.

A safety case is a collection of safety evidence and arguments that demonstrate the safety of a management process or facility throughout its lifetime. While the types of data, calculations, and analyses are different for demonstrating safety in various waste management processes, the approach and strategies used to structure safety cases for different back-end processes have aspects in common.

Having its effort focused mainly in deep geological disposal in the past decades and noting the importance of managing radioactive waste in a holistic and sustainable manner, the RWMC, in 2016, issued a Vision Statement stating that its future work focus shall go beyond deep geological disposal. In particular, the RWMC is considering further utilising the existing IGSC expertise to gather the essential technical safety information for developing other disposal facilities (near-surface or surface disposal).

This workshop has been planned by the RWMC to better understand how the experience on deep geological disposal in the IGSC and that of other disposal options can be shared in the development, use and communication of a safety case. The RWMC considers the IGSC experience in integrating and presenting safety evidence in a safety case, identifying and assessing the risks associated with credible scenarios, managing uncertainties, identifying improvement and corrective actions to support key decisions to developing safety cases for other disposal facilities valuable and relevant. Additionally, the RWMC aims to improve its understanding of the use and updating of safety cases during operations by obtaining additional input and information on how safety cases are being used in decision making and communicating with stakeholders at operating near-surface or surface disposal facilities.

Therefore, the objectives of this workshop are:

• To better understand how to build robust safety cases (to enhance confidence) for various disposal options and their similarities and differences;
• To discuss the methodologies and the outcomes that can be shared between deep geological repositories and other types of disposal facilities;
• To review current challenges and identify the activities to be initiated at the NEA to support the development of safety case for various disposal facilities.

Registration will open on 1 September 2020. For more detailed information, please see the draft concept paper, draft agenda and visit the workshop website.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Tomohiro HIGASHIHARA (Tomohiro.HIGASHIHARA@oecd-nea.org) and John STEIN (John.STEIN@oecd-nea.org).