In the next decades, more than 400 nuclear facilities, hundreds of fossil power stations and an unnamed number of chemical plants will face decommissioning. Thus, it will be inevitable to find ways of decommissioning and deconstruction of various facilities in an efficient and cost-oriented manner.
The PLEIADES project (PLatform based on Emerging and Interoperable Applications for enhanced Decommissioning processES) aims at making the decommissioning of nuclear facilities more efficient, through demonstrating an innovative digital decommissioning approach inspired by the BIM (Building Information Modelling) concept.
To achieve this, PLEIADES addresses the development of a software platform and associated methodology, reusing 3D modelling and BIM applications, for costing, planning, radiation protection and waste management
The idea is to inspire from the BIM concept, which enables all the information related to a building to be managed in a single 3D model. Adapting it to the dismantling of a nuclear installation, PLEIADES gathers in a BIM-like model all the data useful for scenario simulations improving safety, minimising radiation exposure and optimising costs and schedules.
PLEIADES project aims first at defining the requirements and specifications, and specifying a common ontology for nuclear decommissioning. Based on these specifications, a platform will be developped including a set of innovative modules, based on simulation technologies.
Next, the platform will be implemented on use cases based on data from three different nuclear sites: the Santa María de Garoña nuclear power plant in Burgos (Spain), the Halden research reactor in Norway and the BCOT nuclear maintenance facility in Bollène (France). Simulations on these real cases will enable to highlight strengths and weaknesses of such a digital approach.
The expected results of the project are foreseen to:
• Improve safety, specifically by providing improvements in radiological protection, communication between stakeholders and training of workers.
• Reduce costs by enabling better and more standardized costing, as well as higher optimization of the waste management process.
