Background and General Setting - Decision Support for Nuclear Emergency and Remediation

Decision Support for Nuclear Emergency and Remediation

4.1 Background and General Setting

One of the major observations following the nuclear accident from Chernobyl in 1986 was that decision making needs to be harmonised between and in individual countries [Ehrhardt et al., 1993; Ehrhardt and Weiss, 2000; French, 2000; Raskob et al., 2005a].

Initiatives emerged to overcome this problem and the development of a common Deci-sion Support System (DSS), suitable to be applied in the whole of Europe, became one of the major tasks in the area of radiation protection of the European Commission’s Framework Programmes. The development, starting in 1989 and involving more than 40 research institutions and national emergency management organisations in over 20 European countries, resulted in the RODOS²⁰system which provides consistent and com-prehensive decision support at diﬀerent levels in the event of a nuclear or radiological emergency in Europe.

In order to test the applicability of RODOS, a series of moderated stakeholder workshops was organised across Europe.²¹ These workshops were inter alia aimed at familiarising the responsible persons with the capabilities of the system and at gathering feedback in order to ensure that the developments meet the requirements of the potential users [cf. e.g.

Geldermann et al., 2005; Sinkko et al., 2005]. In these workshops, moderation techniques [cf. e.g. Seifert, 2002] were applied in combination with MCDA.

In the following, fundamentals about events at nuclear installations are introduced, pro-viding the basis for classifying such events according to their severity. Subsequently, sim-ilarities between moderation methods and MCDA are pointed out followed by describing their application within the workshops.

4.1.1 Events at Nuclear Installations

Nuclear power plants have multi-level safety devices and, in addition, there are pre-planned safety procedures in order to prevent the occurrence of a nuclear accident with large-scale radiological consequences. Nevertheless, incidents and accidents did occur in the past. So far, the accident in Chernobyl in 1986 had the most serious consequences,

20RODOS: Real-time Online Decision Support System for Nuclear Emergency Management (see:

http://www.rodos.fzk.de)

21Within the EVATECH project (“Information Requirements and Countermeasure Evaluation Tech-niques in Nuclear Emergency Management”), a total of nine workshops were organised in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Poland, the Slovak Republic and the UK.

Chapter 4.1. Background and General Setting 87

116 000 people were evacuated and additional 220 000 people were relocated in the follow-ing years [UNSCEAR, 2000].

For the characterisation and classiﬁcation of events at nuclear power plants, an “Interna-tional Nuclear Event Scale (INES)” (cf. Table 4.1) was designed by an interna“Interna-tional group of experts convened jointly in 1989 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By using consistent terms to communicate the safety signif-icance of events, the scale can facilitate a common understanding amongst the nuclear community, the media and the public and can thus also contribute to safety improvements.

It is successfully being used in over 60 countries [IAEA, 1999].

Table 4.1: The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES) [cf. IAEA, 1999]

Level – Descriptor Examples

7 – Major accident Chernobyl, Soviet Union (now Ukraine), 1986 6 – Serious accident Kyshtym reprocessing plant, Soviet Union (now

Russia), 1957 Accident 5 – Accident with oﬀ-site

risk

Windscale (now Sellaﬁeld), UK, 1957 Three mile island (Harrisburg), USA, 1979 4 – Accident without

sig-niﬁcant oﬀ-site risk

Windscale reprocessing plant (now Sellaﬁeld), UK, 1973

Saint-Laurent, France, 1980 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1983 3 – Serious incident Vandellos, Spain, 1989

Incident 2 – Incident

1 – Anomaly (*)

Deviation 0 – No safety signiﬁcance

(*): The majority of reported events are found to be below Level 3. No speciﬁc examples of these events are given here. Countries in which the scale is used usually provide information on events at the lower levels individually [For Germany for instance, cf. e.g. Lindauer, 2005;

Borst et al., 2006, as well as http://www.bfs.de/kerntechnik/ereignisse/berichte].

4.1.2 Moderated Workshops

Decisions in the context of emergency and remediation management involve many parties who usually have different views, responsibilities and interests [Hämäläinen et al., 2000;

Sinkko, 2004; Carter, 2005; French and Geldermann, 2005; Geldermann et al., 2005, 2007].

Priorities must be set and a consensus must be found for the diﬀerent parties involved in the decision making process. Decision makers (DMs) are those responsible for the decision.

Stakeholders share, or perceive that they share, the impacts arising from a decision and therefore they claim that their perceptions should be taken into account. Experts provide economic, engineering, scientiﬁc, environmental and other professional advice. Analysts are concerned with the synthesis of the DMs’ and stakeholders’ value judgments and the experts’ advice [Belton and Stewart, 2002]. In addition, they guide and assist the DMs and are experienced in applying MCDA.

The stakeholder workshops, organised across Europe, can also be seen as emergency ex-ercises, which are important since the identiﬁcation of responsibilities and authorities is vital to implementing a rapid response in emergency and remediation management [Gel-dermann et al., 2007]. In these workshops, moderation techniques [cf. e.g. Seifert, 2002]

have been applied in combination with MCDA, i.e. the decision making process and, in particular, the processes of problem structuring and preference elicitation were guided by a moderator/facilitator whose responsibility is to lead the discussion and to introduce the individual work steps. This aspect is very important in multi-stakeholder settings in order to reduce potentially arising tensions. Furthermore, moderators steer the group with ques-tions as the work continues and manage the interacques-tions with and between participants.

Without actively interfering into the discussion, their task is to resolve disagreements and to foster consensus building [cf. e.g. Geldermann and Rentz, 2004].

MCDA, as a tool, can be very helpful in structuring such moderated discussions. Addi-tionally, the comprehensive possibilities of visualising results as well as sensitivity analyses constitute a valuable beneﬁt for a moderator and eventually also for the group respon-sible for the decision. The close relation between the phases of moderation and those of multi-criteria decision analysis is visualised in Figure 4.1.

Chapter 4.2. RODOS 89

Intro-duction

Gathering Topics

Selecting a Topic Handling

the Topic Planning Measures to

be Taken

Conclu-sion

Define the Problem

Identify Attributes, Performance

Measures

Create / Identify Alternatives Elicit Inter-Criteria

and Intra-Criteria Preferences Analyse /

Evaluate Alternatives Sensitivity

Analysis

Choose / Recommend an Alternative

and Potential Uncertainties