International Conference on Research Reactors:
Safe Management and Effective Utilization

14-18 November 2011, Rabat, Morocco

Non-nuclear countries started to express their interest in building electronuclear programs in the early 2000s, with the consequence of creating the “nuclear renaissance” concept. Nuclear reactors involve numerous and highly technical sciences: they cover fields from fundamental neutronics to thermohydraulics, from fuel thermomechanics to radiological gas diffusion. These sciences are in complete interactions with each other and computational tools are often required to simulate their effects on a research reactor safety. As these topics have to be examined together, with interaction between each other and in relation to the specificities of the facility, it is crucial to get a keystone engineer to manage these specialized analyses. Consequently, safety assessment requires also specific skills that are not based only on these sciences and that are not initially held by a nuclear engineer. Thus the first objective program is to define the inherent human, professional, and technical characteristics required by a safety analyst. Formalizing a safety analyst profile imposes to identify a set of applicable knowledge, hard and soft skills requirements in four topics. Several routes can be explored to build a safety analyst from a nuclear engineer, such as implementing nuclear safety into universities programs, theoretical training programs tutoring programs; such topics can be dealt with by dedicated instances such as ENSTTI and “field-based” approaches emerging from case by case analysis. In this context, it is important to notice that research reactors require the same basic sciences and are not as complex as nuclear power plants. Hence holding a comprehensive set of knowledge allowing the global safety assessment of the reactor is more easily achievable by a safety analyst. Research reactors are the first object on which this set of knowledge will be applied. It would then be eventually extrapolated to any nuclear installation, and profitably nuclear power plants.

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