INTRODUCTION

How can we continue to remember and understand across generations where, why and how radioactive waste is disposed? This is the question the RK&M initiative addressed. Deep geological disposal of high-level, long-lived radioactive waste and spent fuel was the reference scenario on which the work of the RK&M initiative was based. However, the initiative’s insights and recommendations can also be useful for different types of disposal (e.g. near-surface disposal) and for different types of waste (e.g. lowand intermediate-level radioactive waste, and chemical waste).

1.1. Background and scope of the RK&M initiative

The formulation of a dedicated initiative under the aegis of the RWMC

The question of how to remember and continue to understand where, why and how radioactive waste is disposed of over time was identified as needing dedicated attention by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC). The RWMC is an international committee of senior representatives from regulatory authorities, radioactive waste management and decommissioning organisations, policy-making bodies, and research and development institutions from NEA member countries.2 The RWMC’s mission is to assist NEA member countries in decommissioning and managing all types of radioactive materials, with particular emphasis on the safe management of long-lived waste and spent fuel. To fulfil this aim, the RWMC identifies issues of key importance and concern, and then supports international co-operation to address these issues through various working groups and projects composed of representatives of interested NEA member organisations. The results are documented in reports that function as guidelines for the member states and their respective national radioactive waste management programmes.3

Throughout 2007 and 2008, the RWMC identified knowledge consolidation and transfer as key pillars of its modus operandi and work programme. In 2009, two main areas were identified: the first concerned the intra-generational transfer of current and existing information and knowledge to support national programmes; the second concerned intergenerational transfer (i.e. the sharing of information and knowledge across generations). The latter was judged to be of particular importance in light of the exceptionally long time horizons radioactive waste management (RWM) needs to address (NEA, 2009a).

The relevance of these areas was also brought to the fore by the continued and growing importance of certain other topics identified by RWMC and its national members with regard to preparing and implementing disposal projects, such as: reversibility and retrievability; stepwise decision making; flexibility and adaptability; transfer of responsibilities between institutional actors; avoidance of inadvertent human intrusion; and surveillance and monitoring.4 All these topics depend on the transfer of information to future generations. The need for dedicated attention was also set against the background of national and international policy frameworks and regulatory provisions which explicitly favour the continuation of awareness and knowledge of the location of repositories and the nature of their content over time (EU, 2011),5 but provide limited actual guidance on the topic. Various national members had also received this request from local communities which host, or may possibly host, a disposal facility (NEA, 2015b).

2.The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) participates in the work of the RWMC, and the European Commission is a full member of the committee. The RWMC also maintains strong ties with national high-level advisory bodies to governments and transnational bodies, such as the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP).

3.See www.oecd-nea.org/rwm/#rwmc.

4.See the NEA Forum on Stakeholder Confidence (FSC) (www.oecd-nea.org/rwm/fsc) and the NEA Reversibility and Retrievability (R&R) Project (www.oecd-nea.org/rwm/rr).

5.The Council Directive 2011/70/Euratom of 19 July 2011 establishing a Community framework for the responsible and safe management of spent fuel and radioactive waste, Article 12(e): “[National programmes should include…] concepts or plans for the post closure period of a disposal facility’s lifetime, including…the means to be employed to preserve knowledge of that facility in the longer term.”

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Implementers and regulators were thus found pressed not only by their own needs, but also by the demands expressed by both policy makers and the wider public to show that information and memory transfer is on their agenda (NEA, 2009b).

Against this background, in 2009 the idea of establishing a dedicated, interdisciplinary initiative on long-term preservation of information and memory for geological disposal of radioactive waste was proposed (NEA, 2009b). A questionnaire was prepared to investigate RWMC members’ interest, existing activities and national frameworks related to this field. Responses were provided by implementing agencies and regulators from 12 countries (NEA, 2010) and enabled the RWMC to preliminarily identify some key challenges:

•How to reduce the very large amounts of information produced throughout the research, development and demonstration (RD&D) phase to the required level without being overwhelming.

•How to deal with the fact that societies evolve over time, which implies that not only the information needs to be maintained, but also its meaning and relevance.

•How to address the threat that any sort of marking may attract people to the facility in other ways than just for keeping memory.

In 2010, on the basis of topical RWMC sessions and responses to the questionnaire, the relevance of a shared, broad-based and documented understanding at the international level about concepts and methods for the long-term preservation of information and memory was established. Because of the experience accumulated by the advanced national programmes represented, the breadth of initiatives covered, and its multi-discipline and multi-affiliation composition, the forum provided by the RWMC was identified as an appropriate venue to develop such an understanding (NEA, 2011a). The project was officially launched in March 2011.

A Project Advisory Group was set up to develop a project vision (NEA, 2011a) and a collective statement (NEA, 2011b) outlining the rationale for dedicating attention to long-term information and memory preservation, as well as the project’s objectives:

Disposal of long-lived radioactive waste in engineered facilities built in stable, deep geological formations is the reference means for permanently isolating the waste from the biosphere. Although this management method is conceived to be intrinsically safe and final, i.e. not depending on the presence and intervention of man for fulfilling its safety goal, there is no intention to forgo, at any time, knowledge and awareness either of the repository or of the waste that it contains (NEA, 2011a).

Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) across generations is needed to support lengthy and complex decision-making processes across long operational and post-operational lifetimes of radioactive waste repositories. It is a recognised management task that spans unprecedented time horizons in which technical, scientific, societal and cultural information is interwoven. […]

Experience indicates that RK&M need to be actively managed from the start of the waste management programmes. Individual programmes show initial progress, but there is a need to internationalise the thinking, compare approaches, test potential solutions and build common references. […] A “systemic” approach should be engaged whereby the various components of the system complement each other, provide for redundancy of message communication, and maximise the survivability of a recognisable message.

The international RK&M project of the NEA/RWMC aims at helping disposal programmes to advance plans and adopt best practices in preserving relevant records, knowledge and memory across generations (NEA, 2011b).

Modus operandi of the RK&M initiative

The RK&M initiative was set up with the financial and human resources of interested organisations of NEA member countries. It was agreed that the work would be done by people from these organisations (see Annex 4 for the list of members), with input from invited experts

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and hired consultants. Until 2015, the project was co-ordinated by the NEA and steered by the RWMC Bureau. To further guide and structure the work, in September 2015 the functions of chair and core group or “bureau” were established and filled by elected project members. Project administration was provided by the NEA.

Overall, the initiative was developed in three stages: scoping the issue and identifying key challenges, broadening the understanding, and consolidating lessons learnt and disseminating the initiative’s findings and results to different communities (NEA, 2011a).6 On average two project meetings per year with all project members took place, to present and discuss the work done and to be done in between the meetings.7 Especially in the first stage of the initiative, literature reviews (see Section 1.2 for a historical review) and surveys (questionnaires sent out to project members and beyond)8 were important research methods. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the topic and the acknowledgement that RK&M preservation is not only a technical but notably a social challenge, it was understood that the RWMC would also have to reach out beyond its members, as the new reflections would have to incorporate lessons learnt in research fields not typically represented in waste management organisations, such as history, social sciences and cultural studies. Against this background and in order to further investigate specific themes, workshops with invited outside specialists were organised (such as archivists, archaeologists, cultural heritage specialists and artists), as well as an international conference with invited speakers and a broad outreach.9 As such, over the years, the RK&M initiative became a reference community for ideas, aspirations and practices in the area of radioactive waste disposal related RK&M preservation.

Key questions and objectives of the RK&M initiative

The following key questions were identified as drivers of the RK&M initiative (NEA, 2011a):

•For which reasons and purposes do we need and want to preserve RK&M about radioactive waste across generations? (why?)

•What kind of information needs to be maintained? (what?)

•Over which timescales? (when?)

•By whom and for whom? (who?)

•What can be done now and later to provide maximum continuity and accessibility of RK&M? (how?)

It was accepted that answering all these questions in an exhaustive, definitive manner would be impossible. RK&M preservation is context dependent and describing RK&M preservation over the various timescales of interest inevitably involves a large degree of abstraction. The objectives of the initiative were thus set up as follows (NEA, 2009b): Firstly, to develop a theoretically founded, broad-based understanding (technical, managerial, institutional, societal and cultural) of the issue at stake (covered in Chapters 1 to 4 of this report). And secondly, to develop a practice-oriented

6.Administratively, the project was divided into two phases: phase I from March 2011 to March 2014 and phase II from April 2014 to April 2017 with an extension to 30 April 2018.

7.Project meetings took place at the NEA premises in Paris. On one occasion project members combined a project meeting with a study visit and gathered in Wick (Scotland) at Nucleus: The Nuclear and Caithness Archives (www.highlifehighland.com/nucleus-nuclear-caithness-archives).

8.The following surveys were undertaken by the RK&M initiative during the first stage: 2010 Survey on Status and Needs; 2011 Survey on Responsibilities; 2011 Survey on Examples of Memory Loss; 2012 Survey with questions of Regulatory Significance (focused on the national implementation of the European Waste Directive); 2012 Survey on RK&M and the Safety Case (distributed to the NEA IGSC); 2012 Survey on Safeguards; 2012 Survey on Relationship with National Archives; 2012 Survey on Costs Associated with Loss of Records, Knowledge and Memory in Decommissioning.

9.The first workshop, “The Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations: Scoping the Issue”, took place in October 2011 (NEA, 2012). The second workshop, “The Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations: Improving Our Understanding”, took place in September 2012 (NEA, 2013). The international “Constructing Memory” conference took place in September 2014 (NEA, 2015a).

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“toolbox” of generic yet concrete RK&M preservation approaches, a menu-driven document that will allow people to identify the mechanisms of a strategic action plan for RK&M preservation across generations (covered in Chapters 5 and 6 of this report).

A product and process-oriented initiative

Throughout the development of the initiative’s vision and terminology, the project’s title was changed from the initially proposed “Long-term Preservation of Information and Memory” to “Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations”. This may seem an unduly long project title, but for good reason. The issue under consideration is not only about keeping information as such, but about preserving selected data and information that has been committed to a medium and accompanied by the appropriate context and structure for later uses (records). Moreover, records in themselves have limited meaning without the ability to understand and utilise the data and information they carry (knowledge). In order for this combination of records and knowledge to be transferred across generations, in whatever form and detail, there needs to be awareness of their existence and the reason for their existence, which is supported by a broader awareness of events, people, places and levels of knowledge in the past (memory) (see Annex 1: RK&M glossary).

It was thus acknowledged early on within the RK&M initiative that preservation of RK&M is not only about (final) outcomes (e.g. an archive, a marker, or more generally speaking the records we collect, the things we know, the memories we have), but as much about (ongoing) processes (recording, knowing and memorising) (Schröder and Pescatore, 2012). The change from “long-term” to “across generations” in the project’s title did not mean a focal shift in time, but highlights this societal process-character of RK&M preservation (see also Chapter 4 on key characteristics).

The fields of application and target audiences of the RK&M initiative

While significant challenges exist today with regard to operational knowledge management, the focus of the RK&M initiative was on maintaining RK&M for the post-closure phase of waste disposal facilities. Although it was highlighted that RK&M preservation starts today and needs to be acted upon in the decades leading up to repository closure, the focus was thus not so much on contemporaneous needs within nuclear organisations, but on supporting future generations within society. The present operational challenge of dealing with the very large amounts of information produced throughout the planning, development and implementation phases of disposal projects became the focal topic of a separate initiative established in 2014, called “Radioactive Waste Repository Metadata Management” (RepMet) (www.oecdnea.org/rwm/igsc/repmet). Knowledge management remained part of the RK&M project, although not as a goal on its own, but as one approach among others to serve the goal of RK&M preservation across generations (see Section 5.7 on knowledge management).

In sum, the focus of the initiative was preserving RK&M for the future post-closure phase of repositories for the final disposal of radioactive waste. While deep geological disposal of highlevel, long-lived radioactive waste and spent fuel was the reference scenario on which the RK&M initiative’s work was based, the initiative’s insights and recommendations may also be useful for different types of disposal (e.g. near-surface disposal) and for different types of waste (e.g. lowand intermediate-level radioactive waste and chemical waste). In other words, the insights of the RK&M initiative are relevant for any context in which the question “how can we continue to remember and understand across generations where, why and how hazardous waste is disposed?” is pertinent (see also Chapter 2 on fundamentals).

Keeping in mind the formerly outlined delineations, this report and the other RK&M initiative deliverables are written primarily with an audience of specialists with a formal responsibility in the field of RWM in mind (whether in RD&D, implementation, regulation or policy making). The overarching target audience are all individuals involved in, affected by or interested in RWM. A third audience consists of individuals interested and involved in the broad field of RK&M preservation across generations, regardless of its application (see also Section 4.6 on actors).