Long-Term Knowledge Management with Regard to Prolonged Interim Storage of Nuclear Waste - 23550

The phase out of nuclear energy production together with the retirement of a large proportion of the staff and lacking study courses for nuclear engineering confront the German nuclear community with serious challenges concerning recruiting and education. KTE is responsible for the decommissioning and disposal of the disused nuclear installations of the former research centre Karlsruhe (today part of KIT) in southern Germany with forecast of operation until the 2060's. The research focus of this installation in the 1960's-1990's was the establishment of a closed fuel cycle in Germany. This plan was abandoned after the German reunification in the early 1990's leading to the closure of all plants which were the still in operation. The dismantling of the installations is progressing and by 2030 almost all plants will be closed. With the decommissioning also the knowledge about the research interests, campaigns and materials handled is lost a people leave the site or retire. After the dismantling and packaging of the waste a long period of interim storage will come until the repositories are fully operational and all waste is qualified for disposal. This means that the majority of the operators, researchers and people responsible for decommissioning and dismantling of the facilities and the waste management will be gone until the waste is finally transferred to the repository. The same is true for the general German nuclear community. After the phase out of nuclear power production by the end of 2022 all German nuclear power plants are in the state of decommissioning. The nuclear waste is stored in interim storages at the NPP sites but after the dismantling and packaging of the waste materials the knowledge about the installations is lost. In this sense KTE and the other waste producers have not only the task to remove the nuclear installations but also the duty to preserve all relevant information regarding the waste until it is safely transferred to the repository. The German repository Konrad will open by 2027, the repository for high level waste (HLW) not before 2050. The operation time of the repositories is planned for 30 to 40 years. This also means that the operators of the interim storages responsible for the storage and final disposal of the existing waste will have less and less relation and information regarding the waste in the drums and containers stored on site. The same is true for the regulators and independent experts. After the 2040's people will work in Germany in the field of nuclear waste disposal, who never saw a nuclear installation in operation. For nuclear power plants which are rather standardizes facilities with similar processes and waste streams this problem isn't as large as for research institutions and facilities with nonstandard waste. KTE runs a program for knowledge conservation comprising: - Education and training of specialized professionals; - Documentations and reports which allow a detailed understanding of the research purposes, the plant history and the declaration, the treatment and packaging the resulting waste. - Detailed biannual teaching sessions for young and interested people covering the entire research and operational history of the installations; - Summer-schools covering special fields of interest. The topics taught in this program are grouped into general nuclear knowledge and specific organizational knowledge related to the Karlsruhe site. Because the majority of the nuclear installations on site are demonstration and prototype facilities they are unique in Germany and pose another challenge to the specific knowledge conservation. Further knowledge management efforts include exchange of expertise with other research centers and waste producers in terms of lessons learned and benchmarking and participation in national and international committees. The expertise gathered in these contexts are transferred into the organizations and spread via the teaching programs. (author)