Environment & Safety

• Safety is continuously improved, which is supported by many of ongoing activities.
• Nuclear energy contributes significantly to cleaner environment. Millions of tons of CO2 and SO2 are prevented by operation of nuclear power plants each year. Kyoto protocol cannot be reached without nuclear power plants.
• The issues on radioactive waste have been solved scientifically and technologically.

A few activities are going on at the moment to mitigate the consequences of past mistakes on radioactive waste disposal. Political reasons for reducing the number of nuclear power plants are not always supported by technical arguments, e.g. Barseback closure. The human factor is a dominant contributor to risk.

Better communication with the public and education of incoming generations at very early stages is essential in the future as much as the transfer of knowledge between generations.

The audience questions touched software reliability improvement by application of methods from nuclear safety and methods on radiological consequence analysis. The discussion showed that knowledge gained in nuclear safety is being increasingly used in other fields, e.g. safety analyses in chemical industry, e.g. improvement of safety software reliability.