Around 60 ETSON members met in Munich from 11 to 13 October 2022 for the first ETSON Conference. Representatives of the 14 European Technical Safety Organisations (TSOs) and Japan were present. Despite the current war, Ukraine was able to show its presence online and was represented with a virtual keynote speech to kick off the event. In addition to the member organisations of the ETSON network, experts from the European Commission (EC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also attended the conference. The event replaced the IAEA TSO Conference that was originally scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg.

To ensure the structural integrity of components which are on use in nuclear installations, it is necessary to know their resistance to the initiation and propagation of cracks. Because of their dimensions it is a quite demanding task to prepare the standard fracture mechanics specimens for a classical ASTM test. All the above-mentioned led to the need of introducing a new method for assessing the fracture material properties of tubes with thin walls, called Pin-Loading Test (PLT).

In the framework of the Euratom Research and Training Programme, HARMONISE (a project expected to start in mid-2022) will study relevant research and cooperation activities in standardization and nuclear safety considering also the lessons learnt from the stress tests performed in the EU. The project is coordinated by LEI and involves nine ETSON members along with partners representing research organisations, regulators and industry.

Graphite used in nuclear plants must be disposed of properly. Prolonged aging, even at room temperature, can lead to the formation of different species, such as graphite oxide, which has the possibility of being dispersed into the environment much more easily and this entails a risk that must be taken into consideration

Clearance measurement should be performed as a conformity assessment of the evaluated contamination values to the regulatory limit, considering the measurement’s uncertainty, including the uncertainty of the ratio of the activity concentration of the difficult to measure nuclide to that of the key nuclide. The key issues for the treatment of these uncertainty were summarized.

Advanced concepts of CANDU fuel bundles with more than 37 elements are analyzed comparatively to the 37-rods standard fuel bundle design from the safety performance point of view.

Scientists of Lithuanian Energy Institute have been developing an open-source turbulent combustion solver flameFoam, based on OpenFOAM toolkit. Code to code analysis and comparisons with experiments showed that flameFoam mostly corresponds to the state-of-the-art currently achieved in the field.

Application of statistical non-parametric methods to radioxenon distributions in atmosphere in order to study the atmospheric background fluctuations and the influence of anthropogenic activities.

NRA Secretariat experts developed an empirical method for estimating source vicinity ground-motion levels on hard bedrock and annual exceedance probabilities for inland crustal earthquakes with sources difficult to identify in advance.

For the examination of plasma and impurity transport in the DT experimental campaign, energy balance, dependency on discharge, and the time evolution of radiation loss profiles are provided by LEI scientists. Indeed, the record braking pulse  is also being analyzed here at LEI.

Safety Analyses of SMR with Passive Mitigation strategies - Severe Accident (SASPAM-SA) project proposal has been submitted and has been founded in HORIZON-EURATOM-2021-NRT-01-01, “Safety of operating nuclear power plants and research reactors”. The project is coordinated by ENEA (Italy) and its key objective  is to investigate the applicability and transfer of the operating large-LWR reactor knowledge and know-how to the near-term deployment of iPWR, in the view of severe accident  and emergency planning zone  European licensing analyses needs.

NRA conducted tube burst tests and post-test analyses on high-burnup spent nuclear fuel claddings to investigate the condition for the occurrence of macroscopic hydrogen-induced ductile-brittle transition at operational temperatures with quantitative consideration of precipitated Zr hydrides' morphology.

We have developed a debris bed formation prediction method that takes into account accident scenarios and physical properties by providing THERMOS with the analysis results in MELCOR.

The Fukushima events have highlighted the need for improved safety approaches and numerical tools to assess hydrogen risk. In this regard and under the auspices of ETSON, two main projects are underway. The first is to organize benchmarks for hydrogen combustion codes and the second is to develop Technical Safety Assessment Guidelines (TSAG) for hydrogen risk assessment expected to be completed by the end of 2022. 

SÚRO v.v.i. together with ÚJV Řež, a.s. and Centrum výzkumu Řež s.r.o. received from the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TAČR) the TAČR 2021 Award in the category "GOVERNANCE" for the project "Computational model for thermomechanical behaviour of a fuel rod with the inclusion of degradation processes of nuclear fuel coverage" (TRANSURANUS Project).