The identification, assessment, structuring and dissemination of past and present knowledge of pre-disposal R&D activities accumulated with the European Commission R&D programmes as well as international and national radioactive waste management organisations, is of vital importance for early-stage programmes, advanced programs and future generations. It is the objective of this package to provide access to this knowledge in a systematic and structured way to the participants of the PREDIS beneficiaries and later to the European pre-disposal community. The KM work performed within this work package will be aligned with the KM activities existing in the Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management (EURAD). It will interact with the PREDIS R&D WPs through use of their expertise. The PREDIS KM work package is divided into four tasks to meet these objectives.
- Development of Knowledge management programme
- State of knowledge
- Developing and implementing training programme
- Implementing a mobility programme
Task 3.1 Knowledge management programme
This task relates to the strategic development of the complete PREDIS KM programme, structuring the KM work and development of the PREDIS roadmap, aligned with the EURAD roadmap. It is of significance to avoid duplication of work made in the past or in ongoing projects or programmes when developing the PREDIS KM programme and therefore pronounced attention will be made to integrate initiatives made by e.g. IAEA, OECD/NEA, EDF (NUGENIA), EURAD, national and international initiatives. A central part of this task concerns development of the pre-disposal roadmap (Theme 2 Pre-disposal activities in the EURAD roadmap) taking into account the pre-disposal end-user, stakeholders and community needs. The population of the roadmap, with State of Knowledge documents, trainings and mobility’s will come from Tasks 3.2-4.
EURAD has published a video on the EURAD Roadmap – A generic roadmap for implementing radioactive waste management, leading to geological disposal (link to EURAD Roadmap video).
Task 3.2 State of Knowledge
Strongly coupled to the PREDIS roadmap structures built up in Task 3.1, this second task is responsible for populating the pre-disposal roadmap with State-of-Knowledge (SoK) documents having different levels of details depending on their level in the hierarchic roadmap structure. A significant coordination will be needed between WP2 and WP3 on surveying end-users needs and the interphase between the PREDIS SoK documents and the 1st years gap analysis (Task 2.6).
Tasks 3.3 and 3.4 Developing and implementing training and mobility programmes
PREDIS has special interest in setting and implementing training and mobility programmes to allow newcomers and new generations to acquire the level of knowledge needed to develop a professional career in the different subjects related to the predisposal of radioactive waste. The training and mobility programmes target young professionals (including PhD/PostDocs and trainees) associated with the PREDIS participating organisations. After surveying and prioritising PREDIS participants training needs, a mapping of the required courses will be made among European Radioactive Waste organisations. In absence of suitable training, it will be produced within PREDIS. Identified or implemented trainings are a crucial input to the PREDIS roadmap (Task 3.1).
The mobility programme will follow a similar methodology to training. The main difference is that in this case the participants will be supported for specific short stages in other institutions to develop specific research of interest for both organisations, the one sending the researcher and the one receiving it.
Specific resources are allocated from the PREDIS budget to both training and mobility programmes. Both the programmes and the methodology to apply will be published soon.