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Decommissioning of Research Reactors Workshop

During the week of May 5-9, 2003, the NNSA NA-23 organization - through its Integrated Research Reactor Safety Enhancement Program (IRRSEP) - and the Romanian National Commission for Nuclear Activities Control jointly sponsored a Research Reactor Decommissioning Workshop held in Bucharest, Romania.

The purpose of the workshop was to bring together staff from both regulators and operators of the Soviet designed research reactor community as well as numerous other attendees from Romanian nuclear facilities to provide them all the opportunity to exchange lessons learned from decommissioning projects performed to date as well as general technical information exchange among all of the participants.

Various lecturers presented the workshop lectures including representatives from:

• Argonne National Laboratory,
• the International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna, Austria),
• the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland),
• RAPA LLC (Riga, Latvia)

and two additional US firms

• TLG Services (Bridgewater, CT) and
• New Horizon Scientific LLC (Naperville, IL).

A site visit/tour was taken of the National Institute for Physics & Nuclear Engineering-Horia Hulubei research center in Magurele. At this site, there are numerous research facilities including a Soviet-designed VVR research reactor currently in safe storage awaiting decommissioning.

A total of over 50 participants attended from 11 countries including a large delegation from the host country of Romania. The workshop received very favorable feedback in that many attendees left with a much better understanding and appreciation of the entire decommissioning process and the intricacies of the activities required to safely and efficiently perform these important operations.

Tour of Romanian research reactor during international WS in 2003.