The proposed mobility action involved attending the ICEM 2023 internatial conference on Environmental remediation and radioactive waste management which was held in Stuttgart, Germany. The main objective was to present a joint paper of PREDIS and EURAD on digitization and digital twins in long-term management of radioactive waste. The conference was a little bit disappointing as the number of participants was rather low with a significant number of parallel sessions. Plenary sessions gave a holistic overview of a number topics with high relevance for the road map in PREDIS and EURAD (e.g., Finland’s approach to final disposal of spent fuel and the path towars the world’s first deep geological repository, spent fuel management in VS). Specific sessions were given on EURATOM projects, geological repositories and performance, and cement based materials. An interesting presentation was also the overview of integrated research to spent fuel ranging from characterisation, behaviour during storage and disposal research by Saltzstein (SNL). Note that there were also some presentations from PREDIS.
Overall, this conference has a large potential and is interesting in the framework of EURAD and PREDIS. Two potentially strong points are (i) the broad range of topics (decommissioning, predisposal and disposal activities, NORM waste) and the holistic views related to it, and (ii) an international forum for the exchange of scientific and practical information on management of radioactive waste including waste disposal with different partners experts from academy/research, industry and government on different aspects in the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle However, the current edition did not fulfill completely these potentials, especially for the second point.
