The challenge of information management during decommissioning - 5258

The life cycle for nuclear facilities spans mostly over several decades. The time from final shutdown of the plant up to final clearance of the site will normally last for at least one decade, usually more. For this reason, a proper management of both gathered information and knowledge is crucial for success during operation as well as in decommissioning. Risks can be reduced by taking benefit by the integration of quality assurance functions. Efficient information management will lead to direct and indirect cost savings. Developing software can easily be a wish-list of nice to have features and functionality. One major challenge is to keep a sound balance between the actual needs from the decommissioning projects and what can be considered as good to have. For success automation of data gathering and an integrated information management system is a must for larger projects. Some examples from recent projects where improved information management concepts have been successfully used are shared. For instance a positioning system using RFID has been developed to allow automatic registration of where measurements and sampling are performed in the facility, thus eliminating the need for manual entering of the position. This paper presents and discuss different aspects on information management in decommissioning of nuclear facilities. Views on efficient and safe management of data through and beyond the decommissioning project time scale is shared. Also management aspects on how to keep a balance between real needs and complementary information will be covered. (authors)