U8.01/01 Dissemination of results

The Technical Assistance Programme (TACIS), established in 1991, in the field of Nuclear Safety covered a range of areas with a large number of specific projects intended to improve the safety of all nuclear power plants (NPPs) and other civil nuclear facilities in the TACIS beneficiary countries. This programme included design safety, on-site assistance and operational safety, safeguards, technical support to regulatory authorities, off-site emergency preparedness and fuel cycle and waste management facilities.

The objective of the TACIS programme was to assess major safety issues regarding Soviet-designed reactors and to contribute to appropriate measures for improving operational safety.
Ukraine had been participating in the TACIS Nuclear Programme since 1992. From then until 2002, more than 200 projects had been programmed, contracted or implemented. The status of these projects and/or their achievements had not been widely disseminated.

In the framework of the TACIS 2001 programme, the Commission decided to continue and extend the process of dissemination of information on Tacis nuclear safety projects started under the Tacis 1997 and 1998 programmes with the projects R8.01/97 (contract 26088) and R8.01/98 (contract 30292), but in this case specifically for Ukrainian Tacis projects.

The main objective of the project was to provide assistance to Energoatom and to a wider technical and scientific community in the framework of the Tacis Nuclear Safety Programme by assessing and summarising the status and achievements of completed or ongoing projects for Ukraine and by making up-to-date “Project Results Summaries” publicly available through Internet. This would allow for a broad dissemination of information about achievements and expected results of past and ongoing projects the one hand, and to a more accurate programming of the future projects, one the other hand, by avoiding overlapping of action plans.

The aim was also to help Energoatom to capitalise the knowledge gained during the implementation of modernisation measures at their NPPs, in particular those benefiting from Tacis assistance. This would be achieved by collecting, filing and summarising the corresponding project documentation, tracing the actions from the project initialisation until the updating of the Safety Report. This documentation should further serve Energoatom for internal information on past project results and in replicating implementation of modernisation measures on their units.

This project includes 3 main tasks:

Task 1

This task includes the elaboration of 125 “Project Results Summaries” (PRSs), of 1 – 5 pages, of the major Ukrainian TACIS Nuclear Projects from the whole period 1992-2002, summarising the updated status and achievements of those projects. Theses PRSs had to be loaded onto the WEB-site access enabled database created in the framework of project R8.01/97 (26088) which allowed public access to the information.

This task involved the updating of 100 project summaries from the 1992 – 98 programmes, which had been created in the frame of the R8.01/97 project, and the creation of 25 new project summaries of projects from the 1999 – 2002 programmes.

All project summaries had to be prepared in English and translated into Russian language.

Task 2

This task comprises the preparation of a centralised archiving system for mandatory technical documents of implemented modernisation measures. This included the collection of the reference documents of 4 selected pilot projects, which had been successful in implementing major modernisation measures on operating NPPs by means of TACIS funds and their evaluation in view of the use of the information for the replication of the projects on similar NPPs. A functional specification of the centralised database, which is intended to be implemented at the NNEGC “ENERGOATOM” Head Quarters for archiving the project documentation of all major modernisation measures also had to be developed.

In Ukraine the standard documentation set required for the implementation of modernisation measures includes a large number of documents, starting from the identification of the Safety issue until the issue of the commissioning certificate. The list includes 23 documents (see attached table). All documents retrieved had to be translated from English to Russian or vice versa in order to have a full set of documents in both languages.

Task 3

This task involves the organisation of a one-day seminar for information on the project results and training on access to the “Dissemination” database.

The contract was signed on 20 December 2004 and had a duration of 30 months.

The work was performed in accordance with the above objectives with some small modifications. A total of 126 project summaries were prepared.

Full document sets for Energoatom’s centralised archiving system were prepared for the following projects:

• U1.01/95C-96A, dealing with the replacement of the SG safety valves at Rovno 1, 2 and 3;
• U4.01/94, dealing with waste treatment at Rovno NPP;
• U1.03/96-97C, dealing with Fire protection improvement for cable penetrations at Zaporozhye NPP;
• U1.01/97B, dealing with handling hydrogen in the containment during normal operation and accidents at Rovno 1 and 2.

The Information Day held in Kiev on 26-28 March 2007, at the Great Conference Hall of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine, represented a big success, and was a larger event than originally envisaged in the contract. A total of 97 participants attended the conference, representing all the stakeholders of the TACIS programme in Ukraine (and Russia), such as: the Ministry of Fuel and Energy of Ukraine, the National Nuclear Energy Generating Company “Energoatom”, the State Nuclear Regulatory Committee of Ukraine, the Ministry of Emergencies of Ukraine, the Tacis Monitoring team, the EU-funded Joint Support Office, the Ukrainian nuclear power plants (NPPs) as well Western European organizations involved in implementing Tacis nuclear safety projects (contractors). The presentations, the discussion and the round table represented an important chance to reinforce the main lines of the EC policy in Ukraine and in particular in the nuclear safety area and to identify areas where the program could be improved in order to meet the highest Beneficiary expectations.