Page 62 - Beyond Decommissioning

The fundamentals of industrial redevelopment 43

number of businesses created*;
l
number of visitors*;
l
reversing population decline (number of residents)*;
l
no. of buildings or surface areas (m2) refurbished or removed from the Heritage at Risk list
l
(this is the category name in the United Kingdom, other designations apply elsewhere)*;
l improvement of image and confidence;
l investment into the wider area*; and
l a sustainable use of resources (e.g., recycle of materials)*.

2.6 Knowledge management

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past
implies faith in the future.
Stephen Ambrose (1936–2002), in Fast Company

Knowledge management (KM) is a reliable tool for generation, preservation, trans-
fer, and sharing useful knowledge. Specifically, nuclear KM is defined as KM as
applied to nuclear domain.
In recent years, a drastic change in society’s paradigms has taken place: growing
understanding of ecological long-term problems has been fostering a move away from
treating environmental problems only after they have occurred. The generally
endorsed goal is to plan from the beginning in the life cycle of a human activity
(for our purposes, industrial activities) to avoid costlier and more complicated envi-
ronmental impacts at a later stage. The life-cycle management aims to treat each stage
in the life of a facility or site not in isolation, but as one phase in its overall life. Thus,
the planning does not only address each stage per se, but also is a continuing activity,
taking into account the current conditions and projected developments.
As an application of this integrated approach, the “Joint Convention on the Safety
of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management”
(IAEA, n.d.) requests the avoidance of “undue burdens on future generations.” The
statement given by the OECD-NEA in OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (2006) illus-
trates the same concept: “Safety of current and future generations is the paramount
concern of decommissioning and decommissioning funding.” Based on this principle,
a more prospective management of human activities has been incorporated in the leg-
islation in many countries with a special focus on the preservation of knowledge. In
many countries, there are also regulatory constraints, which require the organizations
to keep records and be able to produce them upon request by regulators or designated
stakeholders. However, the preservation of records is only the baseline for knowledge,
which is a much broader concept. While the longevity of the physical records is essen-
tial, the ability to use them in future is also critical.
The application of KM principles to nuclear decommissioning and environmental
remediation (D&ER) is relatively recent. The life cycle of a nuclear facility including
design, construction, operation, and back end (D&ER) can be even more than
100 years. When the disposal of low-level radioactive waste (LLW) resulting from
D&ER is included, a time period of 300–500 years up to release of the disposal site
is quite normal. The management of high-level waste (HLW) can last for millennia.