State Enterprise Radioactive Waste hosted an international workshop within the IAEA project for technical cooperation which took place from 23 to 27 January 2017. The topic of the workshop was Release of Decommissioning Material and Waste from Regulatory Control. It evoked the interest of 28 participants from 20 countries. They were joined by their Bulgarian colleagues from SERAW, the NSRRP, NRA, INRNE to BAS.
The workshop was organised as part of the European regional project “Decommissioning of nuclear facilities” of IAEA. The reason is that an increasing number of nuclear facilities in Europe is reaching the end of their life cycle and many facilities are already in decommissioning.
„This topic is of importance because of the serious amount materials and radioactive waste that will be generated from decommissioning and because of the potential for reducing the amount which have to be treated as RAW. Significant amounts of clean materials or potentially clean materials could be cleared through systematic approach, measurements and verification that these materials do not pose radiological risk. In this workshop we addressed mostly the regulatory aspect and the safety aspect of clearance, calculation of the values for release of materials from regulatory control”, said Mr Vladan Liubenov, Technical Leader of the training project. He added that the topic would be further developed at similar event in the middle of the year and at the end of the year an international conference will be organised in Berlin which will be dedicated to the issues of the clearance of materials from decommissioning and to the harmonisation of the standards in this field.
At the end of the event Mr Vladan Liubenov summed up the participants’ impressions from the Bulgarian hosting of the event: “We are very happy with the organisation. The experts could completely concentrate on their work. We are thankful to the Bulgarian party for this hosting and to SERAW for the technical contribution with the valuable experience they shared.”
