Expert Group on a Data and Information Management Strategy for the Safety Case (EGSSC)
NEA and IFNEC's visit at ANDRA's CMHM site - Bure, France - 10 December 2018. Photo: NEA

Large volumes of data, information and knowledge are required to carry out the safety analysis for a radioactive waste storage or disposal facility. This analysis is detailed in a safety case, which is a set of evolving documentation, updated throughout the lifecycle of the facility, to demonstrate the safety of that facility. It is important that the safety case remains available and accessible, during planning, construction, operations and closure, and potentially long into the future, for stakeholders to have confidence in the safety of the facility and to support informed decision making.

As the geological disposal programme progresses, the available information will increase in type, detail and volume. This includes information on the disposal system itself, including inventory, engineered barriers and geology, how these work together to ensure safety, and also on the decisions taken throughout the development process, whose rationale must be captured and set into context. Failure to preserve this information introduces the risk of the loss of confidence of regulators, the public or other stakeholders, together with the associated financial and resource cost of re-work.

Information, data and knowledge management (IDKM) considerations concerning the safety case need to be made during its creation. This includes the selection of information and data, metadata tagging, modelling of the relationships between information resources, and approaches to developing and structuring safety case arguments to ensure continued accessibility.

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The Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management (WP-IDKM) has decided to establish the Expert Group on a Data and Information Management Strategy for the Safety Case (EGSSC) at its plenary meeting on 10 September 2020. The current mandate is effective from September 2022 to September 2024.

The EGSSC shall carry out the following key tasks and relevant supporting activities:

  • Further developing NEA’s existing data and metadata libraries on radioactive waste packages, site description and repository engineering.
  • Creating data and metadata libraries to describe the safety case, its production process and evolution, and supporting tools (for example datasets and associated modelling activities, which support safety assessments).
  • Investigating approaches for organisations to move to digital safety cases, including considerations of the advantages and disadvantages of such, and how such safety cases should be structured and contextualised to enhance present day and future use by all stakeholders.

 

Contact

Shogo Nishikawa

Jesus S. Martinez

John Stein