Digital Safety Case Integration for Radioactive Waste and Geological Disposal
Background

Radioactive waste is produced in all phases of the nuclear fuel cycle and from the use of radioactive materials in industrial, medical, defence and research applications. After creation and use, many countries have a policy of interim storage, followed by permanent disposal underground in engineered repositories located in a suitable geological formation. Significant quantities of data and information are generated throughout this lifecycle, and these must be stored and managed appropriately for more than 100 years of many national disposal programmes.

In 2020, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) created the Working Party on Information, Data and Knowledge Management (IDKM) to co-ordinate its work in this area in a more holistic way. 

The concept of a safety case has been initially developed as a quasi-static product, being a snapshot incrementally developed for key stages (typically several years apart) of a geological disposal programme. With the progress towards implementation, the safety case has evolved into a dynamic tool facilitating R&D steering, requirement management, data and decision traceability, and the integration of operational and long-term requirements. This, in turn, suggests safety cases are likely to need be updated more frequently in the future, while the safety case concept has not adapted to the significant advances in IT over the same period. Knowledge management and digitalisation appear to be instrumental in practically implementing an evolving safety case from the generic stage to the disposal operation.

In this context, the Expert Group on a Data and Information Management Strategy for the Safety Case (EGSSC) was established in 2020 under the WP-IDKM. The group's mission is to develop good IDKM practices when structuring and managing a safety case. Recent and ongoing advancements in digital technologies are expected to bring about significant enhancements to the production and use of a safety case, in particular.

In October 2022, the NEA's EGSSC and Germany's Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE) organised a workshop on Digital Safety Case Methods and Development in Berlin, Germany. The workshop demonstrated that many countries are now exploring digital elements related to their safety cases, but no organisation has a well-developed, complete, vision for what a "digital safety case" may look like, and what features and benefits it would have. The EGSSC programme of work aims to support member countries to progress such a vision through international collaboration and is strongly supported by the NEA’s Radioactive Waste Management Committee.

The focus of the 2022 workshop was the "narrow" digital safety case, i.e. systems and approaches which help in storing or managing the synthesis of safety claims and associated arguments and evidence, including safety assessment and its various components (e.g. data management). This included aspects such as: feature, event and process (FEP) database management; approaches to storing and searching safety case narratives; claims, arguments and evidence (CAE); and data and model management. The EGSSC has begun to progress work to address topics which arose during the workshop.

A joint meeting between GeneSiS (an NEA IGSC project on Generic to Site-specific Safety cases) and the EGSSC was held in June 2024 to provide general background on ontologies and their benefits, discuss the aims of a safety case ontology and its role within planned work for both GeneSiS and EGSSC, share relevant work from participating organisations, begin to develop use cases for the ontology, and present and further develop an initial draft of a safety case ontology diagram. Facilitation of this workshop, and particularly the development of safety case ontologies was supported by the attendance of an ontology expert, alongside safety case and systems engineering experts. The results of this meeting will be presented at the NEA Safety Case Symposium 2024

The initial workshop was intended to be followed by a second, which would focus on the "wider" digital safety case, exploring how the multiple disciplines needed to provide evidence of safety come together digitally. This would include integrating the safety case with site characterisation databases, engineering design systems, inventory and waste package record databases, requirements management systems and similar, to ensure a demonstrable "golden thread" from the safety case into detailed evidence. In practice, there are often multiple steps of abstraction and interpretation to obtain inputs to safety assessment. Understanding this flow of information helps organisations to better manage their safety case, and suitably integrated digital systems should therefore help to support and record the impact of change (e.g. as facility designs evolve or as site characterisation information arrives) thereby helping ensure the continued robustness of the safety case. There are a number of existing lifecycle management standards, for example Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), which may help to integrate systems in this way, but which have yet to be explored for this purpose.

The NEA is now planning the second workshop, which will provide a forum to bring together cross-disciplinary technical experts from safety case, site characterisation, design, requirements management/systems engineering, change control management and similar, to begin to develop this wider digital vision. A key aspect of this is to ensure that the safety case remains accurate as changes, permeating across all disciplines (and their associated systems), are made.

Objectives

The objectives of this workshop are to:

  • Provide a forum for NEA groups (EGSSC, IGSC, WP-IDKM) to present their work to date;
  • Allow member countries (including RWMOs, TSOs and regulators) to present national work and to understand what others are doing;
  • Bring together scientific and information technology specialists working on the safety case to understand the opportunities that current and emerging digital technologies may provide;
  • Understand how existing or planned safety case systems can be integrated into the wider scientific toolset within a disposal organisation, while ensuring a "golden thread" is preserved;
  • Understand how digital technologies can help to facilitate safety case change control processes within an organisation, improving efficiency and robustness;
  • Understand how digital tools can support key safety case processes such as FEP screening, scenario and model development;
  • Consider how to connect EGSSC/IGSC’s developing safety case ontology into other domains, for example existing standards used by site characterisation or construction experts;
  • Begin to build an international consensus on the vision, features and benefits of a future digital safety case;
  • Provide an opportunity for networking and knowledge exchange; and
  • Identify future work items for the EGSSC programme of work.
Audience

This workshop is intended for subject matter experts in radioactive waste safety cases and related technical underpinning fields, and experts in digital technologies with the potential to be applied in these fields.

It will particularly appeal to individuals and organisations interested in how current and emerging digital technologies can help produce the robust safety cases needed for geological disposal. This will include safety case professionals, scientists and engineers, data and model managers, safety case integrators, programme managers, technical knowledge managers, and IT staff from RWMOs and supporting TSOs as well as regulators involved in reviewing safety case submissions.

Presentations and discussions will be at an "intermediate" level of detail, with a focus on the interfaces and interactions between technical domains, rather than low-level developments in the domains themselves. This is intended to allow experts in different fields to communicate, understand how information will be shared (and associated systems need to interoperate) and facilitate a collective holistic understanding.

Programme

The programme outlined below is intended for illustration only. A detailed final programme, including a clear definition of the scope of each session and the presentations that will be included within it, will be developed by the Programme Committee based on submitted abstracts.

  • Keynote lectures (invited talks) on:
    • Holistic consideration of a digital safety case
  • Oral and poster presentations on:
    • How can digital technologies help coordinate change management for safety cases?
    • Regulating safety in an increasingly digital world
    • The developing role of systems engineering and requirements management
    • Relevant developments in underlying domains
    • Moving toward a digital safety case
  • Discussion in plenary/groups

Further illustration of the programme is provided in the draft agenda which can be downloaded from this website.

Practical information
  • Announcement of the conference and registration opens (October 2024)
  • Submission of abstracts closes (19 December 2024)
  • Notification to authors of abstracts for acceptance of presentation (January 2025)
  • Issue of final programme (February 2025)
  • End of registration (31 March 2025)
  • Workshop (23-24 April 2025)
  • Workshop Report Published (Q1 2026)

 

Abstract submission

A call for abstracts has been launched by the NEA for non-invited presentations, with interested parties asked to submit short 300 to 500 word abstracts with the form downloadable on this page. Please send your abstract file to: dsc-workshop2025@oecd-nea.org. Abstracts will be reviewed by the Programme Committee and those accepted will be added to the final programme.

The authors of the accepted abstracts will also be asked to supply 3-5 page papers for each presentation. These will be collated and published on the NEA workshop page.

 

Registration

Register here

Registration and attendance are free of charge.

If following your registration you decide not to attend, please send a cancellation note to dsc-workshop2025@oecd-nea.org.

Programme Commitee

A dedicated Programme Committee has been established to design the content and format of this workshop, including representatives from the EGSSC and the IGSC

Manuel CAPOUET

ONDRAF/NIRAS, Belgium

Alexander CARTER

NWS, UK

Olivier DE CLERCQ

FANC, Belgium

Lucia GRAY

NWS, UK

Jonathan KINDLEIN

BGE, Germany

Shogo NISHIKAWA

NEA

Luca PICIACCIA

DSA, Norway

Klaus-Jurgen ROHLIG

TU Clausthal, Germany