Conferences

On 3rd – 6th November Charles McCombie was a member of a consultant group that met at the IAEA in Vienna to prepare for an INPRO Study on “Cooperative Approaches to the Back End of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle”. The consultants from France, Ukraine, Russia, USA, Vietnam prepared Terms of Reference  for a major 3 year study being launched by the IAEA following an earlier Dialog Forum meeting on this topic. Important input for the meeting arrived in a timely fashion with the release of the latest IAEA document in this area – a report, titled FRAMEWORK AND CHALLENGES FOR INITIATING MULTINATIONAL COOPERATION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF RADIOACTIVE WASTE REPOSITORY, for which Charles was one of the principles authors.

On October 28^th Charles McCombie was a panelist in The Hague at a seminar on “Ethics and involving the public in nuclear waste management”. At the meeting, the contributors to three new publications presented an overview of their work. These were:

• the book “The Ethics of Nuclear Energy. Risk, Justice and Democracy in the post-Fukushima Era” (Cambridge University Press)
• a special volume in Journal of Risk Research on “The socio-technical Challenges of Nuclear Energy Production and Nuclear Waste Management” and
• A Rathenau Institute report on “Enabling participation: A vision on public participation in decision-making about long-term radioactive waste management”.

This was followed by panels in which Charles was involved and discussions on Public participation and radioactive waste management and on the Ethics and long-term governance.

MCM gave a presentation at the 1st Chemistry in Energy Conference, in Edinburgh: “Chemical challenges for safety cases supporting geological disposal of radioactive waste”. Two posters were also presented: “Remediation of sites contaminated from nuclear energy generation activities” and “Use of advanced tools to manage the chemical complexity of carbon capture projects”.

Wolfgang Kickmaier was invited to the AMNT Conference Germany. “What can Germany learn from other national radioactive waste management programmes ?”

MCM was invited to give a paper on “Management options for Fukushima corium” at the IUMRS-ICA conference in Japan.

Neil Chapman lectured at the Geological Society of London’s 5th society lecture for 2014 “Managing Nuclear Power on a Dynamic Earth”, which took a look at what scientists are doing to pinpoint and assess tectonic hazards to nuclear facilities worldwide.

In recent months MCM participated as lecturers for various ITC courses: “Practical Aspects of Repository Engineering for Disposal of Spent Fuel/HLW in Sedimentary Environments”, Peine, Germany; “Safety Principles”, Brugg, Switzerland; “Fundamentals of Geological Disposal”, Prague, Czech Republic.