EURAD - D12.7 - Contribution to the EURAD Roadmap Gap Analyses - Guidance and guide-like documents

Within Work Package 12 (Guidance) of EURAD, activities aim to develop a comprehensive suite of instructional guidance documents that can be used by EU Member-States with radioactive waste management programmes, regardless of their phase or level of advancement with implementation of geological disposal.

This report summarizes the mapping of available guides and guide-like materials up to October 2022 on geological disposal of SNF, HLW and long-lived waste. It also contains a gap analysis, presented at the end of the document. This is very important as it is an input to the D12.5. Several information sources have been analysed such as international organisations’ publications, open websites; in addition, a thorough search through all EURATOM Framework programmes was performed.

As far as possible there are links made of the existing guides and guide-like documents to the themes, sub-themes and domains of the EURAD Roadmap (signposting). It provided a hierarchical structure that facilitates definition of topics for further guidance. All of this allows knowledge to be captured and presented with the level of detail that is required by the end-user, from a broad overview down to an increasing level of detail. Almost 300 guidance and guide-like documents on geological disposal were screened.

The screening of the existing guides or guide-like technical documents indicated that much information already exists on topics related to RD&D and technical programme management towards implementation of geological disposal of radioactive waste. If one adds ‘examples’ then there are hundreds of documents more that could be included in every themes, subthemes and domains.

It was found that most of the EURAD Roadmap themes are at least touched upon in existing documents. It was, however, noted that the level of detail with which some topics are covered may be too low and that further development of these topics may be warranted. Furthermore, the information on some topics is currently scattered over a number of documents.

Further guidance can be developed using material that can be found in existing publications as a starting point.