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.

CONNECT-NM is a co-funded European Partnership on nuclear materials for all reactor generations that applies modern digital technologies to materials science practices for the acceleration of innovation. It implements plans elaborated in the ORIENT-NM CSA with 5 strategic goals: (1) Nuclear materials (NM) acceleration platforms; (2) NM test-beds for accelerated qualification; (3) Intelligent materials health monitoring; (4) Advanced methodologies for prediction of materials behaviour in operation; (5) NM knowledge organisation system. Accordingly, the work will be organised in 5 research lines: (1) Advanced materials development & manufacturing; (2) Materials & component qualification: testing, standardization & design rules; (3) Non-destructive examination & materials health monitoring; (4) Advanced materials modelling and characterization; (5) Nuclear materials knowledge & data management. Each research line will coordinate call-selected Projects. CONNECT-NM will centralize transversal activities for the benefit of all Projects: e.g. coordination & management; E&T and infrastructure access; communication, dissemination & result exploitation; interaction with stakeholders; data management. Collaboration is foreseen with international organisations and bodies dealing with safety, standardisation, data management, as well as with fusion & non-nuclear energy communities. All activities align with national and European initiatives on nuclear materials, strengthening R&D&I and avoiding fragmentation and duplication, with direct involvement of industry, TSOs and regulatorsas active partners and end-users.

The ambition of the PIANOFORTE Partnership is to improve radiological protection of members of the public, patients, workers and environment in all exposure scenarios and provide solutions and recommendations for optimised protection in accordance with the Basic Safety Standards. Research projects focusing on identified research and innovation priorities will be selected through a serie of three competitive open calls. The input to define the research priorities will be based on the priorities defined in the Joint Road Map (JRM) developed during the H2020 CONCERT EJP but also on the results of ongoing H2020 projects and on the expectations expressed by other actions carried out in other European programmes, in particular the SAMIRA action plan. High priority will be dedicated to medical applications considering that 1) medical exposures are, by far, the largest artificial source of exposure of the European population and 2) the fight against cancer is a top priority of the present European Commission. In order to ensure an appropriate continuity in the research goals and methodologies, in line with the contents of the CONCERT JRM, two other priorities have been identified to further understand and reduce uncertainties associated with health risk estimates for exposure at low doses in order to consolidate regulations and improve practices and to further enhance a science-based European methodology for emergency management and long-term recovery. Once the research priorities defined, the open call system will promote excellence in science and widening participation through a process open to the whole radiation protection community. Beyond the research actions, the selected projects will be able to benefit from the system of sharing and mutualisation of infrastructures that will be implemented at the European level. This will be accompanied by education and training schemes for health workforce and young scientists to increase Europe’s research capacity in the field.