From nuclear stagnation to renaissance: The challenge of transferring regulatory knowledge

Full text: Around 20 years ago there was a de facto nuclear stagnation of the peaceful uses of atomic energy in the West. At the time, governmental institutions for nuclear research and regulation, as well as the nuclear industry, had a nuclear 'intelligentsia' and many well qualified specialists available. Moreover, universities were ready and able to educate the next generation of professionals. The decline of the nuclear industry was therefore damaging both for individuals and the schools educating them. The options were few: for the workers, to restart a working life in other industries or to try to hang on until retirement; for the educational institutions, to abandon researching and teaching nuclear subjects. Now, however, an emerging energy crisis and growing environmental concerns about the burning of fossil fuels are inducing Western politicians to rethink the soundness of the decision to curtail the nuclear power industry. It therefore seems that there will be a nuclear renaissance, but that the qualified personnel to carry this out are no longer available, since in the intervening years they have changed jobs, retired or died. Put simply, the plentiful workforce responsible for last century's nuclear miracle is no longer there. Moreover, a cultural gap exists between the past and present generations, and such a lack of cultural continuity creates a difficult challenge for the traditional inter-generational knowledge transfer that has enabled development in the past. There are many reasons for this situation, and it will be for historians to explain them, but it is obvious that the Chernobyl accident and the public belief that nuclear installations were not safely regulated played a crucial role. At the time, nuclear regulatory authorities were less demanding, and in many countries they simply did not exist. Concepts such as regulatory independence and strengthening and safety culture are generally post-Chernobyl phenomena. Moreover, over the past decades a significant development has occurred in both the epistemology of radiation exposure and its health effects and on the radiation safety paradigm. It seems therefore that the new situation creates particular problems for knowledge transfer in nuclear regulatory authorities, even more perhaps than in the industry itself. The paper analyses the challenges of knowledge transfer and management that a nuclear renaissance will pose to regulatory authorities worldwide. The particular situation in the author's country, Argentina, which was one of the first Western countries to formally declare a rebirth of the nuclear industry, is presented as an example of the mammoth effort that will be required to restore regulatory knowledge on the scale needed for a revitalized nuclear programme. Finally, a synthesis is presented on the possible ways forward, including international actions that could ameliorate the situation. (author)