“A step change in European collaboration towards safe RWM, including disposal, through the development of a robust and sustained science, technology and knowledge management programme that supports timely implementation of RWM activities and serves to foster mutual understanding and trust between Joint Programme participants.” here is the description of the objective of EURAD and its activities on their website.
Further it is said that “EURAD Vision, SRA and Roadmap will be delivered through 5-year implementation phases broken down into a set of Work Packages, Tasks and Sub-Tasks.” In fact, this month is the beginning of the last year of this programme in which the Civil Society (CS) had a role to play on different Work Packages (WPs) represented by a diversity of CS experts from NTW:
- Strategic studies : understanding of uncertainty, risk and safety (WP UMAN) and waste management routes in Europe from cradle to grave (WP ROUTES).
- Interaction with the civil society: Civil Society Organisations represented in a group of CS experts working on strategic studies or represented in a larger group of CS members met along the years at Workshops to build a coherent approach on how insure the implementation of the Aarhus Convention in the field of Radioactive Waste Management (RWM).
- Knowledge Management: this WP tried to gather the work developed in EURAD and to make it accessible, therefore CS experts helped with their contributions.
- R&D: the CS experts did not work on the R&D itself but rather tried to envision the societal impact and influence of technical topics such as monitoring.
During this last year NTW will work on an of its task in this programme which is “Dissemination” meaning sharing the inputs and work done with a larger audience than EURAD. A first glimpse of that could be found in the list of webinars below but more will come on the rest of the work done on this topic (deliverables, papers…):
- A webinar series under the frame of NTW on Transparency and Public Participation (T&PP) in RWM for 9 national cases (Sweden, Denmark, France, United-Kingdom, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Germany, Greenland) which is running since January with a webinar every month.
- Webinars under the frame of EURAD on the role of Knowledge Management in Civil Society or on a pluralistic tool of dialogue on RWM.