Development of radioactive waste management licensing review assistant

Regulations on radioactive waste disposal are now in urgent need due to our increasing consumption of electric power from nuclear origin. It is set forth that actually applying the regulations to evaluate the license application of new repositories for interim storage and final disposal of High-Level Waste and Low-Level Waste before the year of 2000. In the mean time, it is expected to establish the basis for the decision on issuing the license. The license review procedure can be very complicated, because too many factors must be taken into consideration. For the time being, licensing review is as much an art as it is a science. The authority usually faces three major problems; (1) the availability of domain expert, (2) maintaining of high quality and consistent reviews, and (3) the documentation of the review process. However, to maintain a more efficient, accurate, and systematic review procedure, and at the same time to reduce costs, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques may be used. An expert system is designed as a radioactive waste management licensing review aid for the staff those are in charge of the license application. Tasks such as completeness checking, functional areas of review distribution, participation confirmation, knowledge acquisition, review comment collection, weighting calculation, and degree of satisfaction are considered. In this paper we will discuss the development of the radioactive waste management licensing review assistant