When dealing with emergency, two issues with fully different time requirements and operational objectives, and thus different methods and tools, have to be considered: emergency preparedness and emergency response. This project will address both issues by combining the efforts of organizations active in these two areas to make already identified deterministic reference tools and methods a decisive step toward. In particular capabilities of these methods and tools will be extended to tackle main categories of accident scenarios in main types of operating or foreseen water-cooled NPPs in Europe, including Spent Fuel Pools. A first task will be the identification of these categories of scenario, the proposition of a methodology for their description and the development of a database of scenarios. Building this database will constitute a first important step in the harmonisation goal defended in this project. Promising probabilistic approaches based on Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) are currently developed to complement operational deterministic methodologies and tools by contributing to diagnosis accidental situations. The development of the methodologies will be pursued in this project with the extension of the existing deterministic ones to European reactors. Both approaches will be assessed against the above mentioned database of scenarios. Finally a comprehensive set of emergency exercises will be developed and proposed to be run by a large set of partners. A first series of exercises will address source term evaluations that will be compared to the reference source terms from the scenarios database. Then a second series of exercises will be proposed on the same scenarios that will be used for the first series but accounting for the main emergency objective : to protect the populations. Progresses made by the methods and tools developed within this project will be notably assessed by comparing the results obtained in these two series of exercises.

The aim of NFRP-2019-2020-09 call is to capitalise existing technologies for characterisation and risk assessment, dismantling, on-site waste management and environmental remediation in order to gain needed efficiencies in the decommissioning of nuclear power reactors. One very challenging dismantling task in the focus of the industry is the segmentation of the reactor pressure vessel and internals. Limitations are known for all conventional cutting techniques currently used including mechanical cutting, plasma arc cutting or abrasive water jet cutting. In this context, the laser cutting technology for nuclear dismantling, an adaptation from the manufacturing industry developed by over a decade of R&D efforts, is identified in Europe and elsewhere in the world as a promising alternative. The objective of the LD-SAFE project is to validate the laser cutting technology for the dismantling of the most challenging components of power nuclear reactors in air and underwater. LD-SAFE project will remove the last barriers to enable the replacement of conventional cutting techniques and prove by 4 specific objectives that the technology is mature (TRL7): - Objectives 1: Demonstration of the capabilities of a versatile laser cutting solution to address the key technical challenges in decommissioning of large nuclear facilities - Objectives 2: Environmental and safety assessment of the implementation of laser cutting for nuclear reactor decommissioning - Objectives 3: Technical validation of the laser cutting prototype in operational environment (TRL7) - Objectives 4: Demonstration of the economic advantage of using the laser cutting technology for the forthcoming reactor decommissioning market LD-SAFE consortium is a strong partnership of 4 leading industrials and 2 European research centres having extensive track-records in the field of dismantling of nuclear facilities; environment and people protection; safety assessment; and associated domains.