Towards a self sustaining European Technology Platform on Preparedness for Nuclear and Radiological Emergency Response and Recover

The impacts of radiation accidents go well beyond the health effects of radiation exposures. Accidents can bring about a variety of social and economic consquences and these need to be addressed in emergency planning. The NERIS project started in January 2011 with the main objective of creating a European platform for emergency and management following a nuclear accident. Soon after the start of the project, the Fukushima accident in Japan has made the research more pertinent, with a significant increase in the relevance and international interest in the work. Work carried out by NMBU included arranging an international workshop on ICRP guidelines in early 2012, providing lectures and training materials on societal aspects and stakeholder communication for training courses, arranging an international workshop on Emergency Preparedness and Stakeholder Participation in 2014 and supporting local - national stakeholder conferences on post-accident management. In addition to the planned activities in Norway, expert-stakeholder dialogue initiatives were expanded to include ICRP dialogues with affected populations in Fukushima. NMBU participated in 5 such dialogues between 2012 and 2014. Both the Fukushima accident and the research carried out by NMBU has illustrated the importance of social, ethical and economic aspects of the nuclear accidents, which is one of NMBUs main contributions to the NERIS project.

This project aims to keep the momentum gained through the European Project EURANOS in establishing a platform where the operational and research community can meet and discuss with all the relevant stakeholders the topics related to emergency response and recovery preparedness and on the other hand to tackle urgent research topics in the area of nuclear emergency response and recovery preparedness. It addresses the call Fission-2010-3.3.1: European platform on emergency and post-accident preparedness and management. Through a collaboration of industry, research and governmental organisations in Europe, methodological aspects and computational models will be developed to be consistent with recent recommendations from international bodies such as the ICRP ( International Commission of Radiation Protection) and improve Europe's response by coupling the decision support systems with an early notification system such as ECURIE. Within this project, a platform will be established that will be a unique place for combined meeting of the research and the operational community. The project covers five work packages (WP), and UMB will contribute primarily to WP 3 (Prepardeness at National and Local Level) and WP 5 (Training and Dissemination). The main activities w ill be facilitation of national stakeholder forums, the evaluation of social and ethical aspects of emergency response, and running training courses and excercises.