Knowledge management in the decommissioning of nuclear facilities in Brazil

Abstract

In the second half of the twentieth century in Brazil, several nuclear facilities were built for the most varied objectives. The largest number of such facilities is at the Nuclear and Energy Research Institute in São Paulo (IPEN-CNEN/SP). For different reasons, some of these facilities had their projects finalized and were deactivated. Some of the equipment was then dismantled, but the respective nuclear and radioactive material remained isolated in the original sites waiting for the proper decommissioning procedures. The Celeste Project is an example of a facility where the nuclear material has been kept, and is subject to Argentine-Brazilian Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) periodic inspections. Because of a number of interests, including financial and/or budgeting situations at the institutions, decades have passed without any further action; the people who originally worked there, and possessed information and knowledge about these facilities, have already moved away from the area, or are in the process of. Therefore, because of the absence of knowledge management techniques in force at the time of establishing and operating these installations, this work proposes an analysis about the possible consequences in case of loss of perhaps the only one remaining knowledge, the one from the people who designed those departments and worked there.