In the context of international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), three international benchmarks focused on the neutronics and thermal-hydraulics of lead-cooled fast reactors (LFR) have been recently launched under the coordination of ENEA.

The aim of the project is to develop risk analysis and forecasting system aimed at protecting ICs and national strategic assets, especially as regards the prediction of seismic phenomena. It is believed that analysis of high-resolution time series of Radon concentrations in groundwater, air and soil may be a suitable method for identifying seismic precursors. The aim of the work is to devolp new sensor technologies to create a system for forecasting, simulating and mitigating risk related to the monitoring of air, water and soil matrix.

These last months have witnessed a renewed interest in Italy of industry, and the private sector in general, for nuclear. The reasons behind this are mainly the need to investigate options to help (1) reducing carbon dioxide emissions to cope with climate change issues, (2) decreasing electricity prices, and (3) increasing the security of energy supply by lowering the current reliance on foreign natural gas imports. 

International Workshop to share knowledge about innovative systems and technologies related to the safety of future and current reactors, supporting the technology transfer from research to industry in the field. 

An IAEA Coordinated Research Project (CRP) on Forced to natural circulation transition in the Heavy liquid metal loop NACIE-UP is currently ongoing. A numerical benchmark will assess the capabilty of numerical codes to reproduce experimental data.

Instead of automated sampling for noble gases and analysing stations, manual system can be used to better accommodate costs for the equipment and flexibility of usage. One of this system has been developed by the Traceability Laboratory at the ENEA Research center of Brasimone, which was specially designed in order to keep the sampling equipment separate from the processing and measurement.

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

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.

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.

Ensemble weather forecasts can be very useful in properly predicting the dispersion of radioactive material in an accident, but they are very expensive to use. We present a surrogate model approach that aims at recovering the information from the whole ensemble while trying to still be fast enough to be used in emergency situations.