D9.22 Part B.02 - Stakeholder engagement through scenario-based discussion panels - Report of the French National Panel.

DURAND V. (IRSN), MAITRE M., ANDRESZ S., SCHNEIDER T., CROUAIL P., CHARRON S. (IRSN)

Report EJP-CONCERT-CONFIDENCE, European Joint Programme for the Integration of Radiation Protection Research – 2019.

CEPN-R-317, 2019.

Abstract

In the context of post-accident management following a nuclear accident (emergency and transition exposure situations), it is important to understand the main uncertainties which will play a key part in the decision-making process. The main goal of the work is to identify and evaluate these uncertainties during the preparedness phase with their interactions with decision processes. The French team (IRSN/CEPN) organized 2 panel meetings during 2018: i) in June focused on the emergency phase. The objective was to understand and evaluate how and on which uncertain elements a decision maker is basing her/his understanding and taking decisions in such a context; ii) in October, the panel focused on the transition phase. For this second panel meeting, the aim was to assess the influence of prior decisions taken during the emergency phase over the medium to long term decision process taking into account the uncertainty associated with the emergency phase. The French national panel was composed of several experts of the institutional French organisations and authorities. This panel is representative of some decision makers at different levels (local and national) of the French response system. The panel was focussed on two protective actions: evacuation and temporary relocation of populations and restrictions on consumption and distribution.

The methodology used for the two panel meetings was to consider inherent uncertainties about the real situation: for the first panel meeting, WP1 of CONFIDENCE outputs have been presented with other maps which showed challenges of the territory concerned. For the second meeting, a synthetic map of “real measurement data” provided by WP1 from simulated airborne monitoring has been used to show the difference between forecast data and measurement. For each panel meeting, several issues have been also provided to the panel.

Overall, these meetings resulted in the following findings: i) the temporal dimension (evolution of zoning with time) is confirmed to be very useful for decision-makers; ii) there is a need for different types of information to help decision-making (geographic information socio-economic issues of the territories, etc.) and not solely radiological impacts data; iii) the transition between emergency and post-accident phases (for all decision-makers) is critical; iv) the decisions would also be political and taken in high levels (but on a common basis). Beyond these elements, these meetings allowed to highlight several types of uncertainties associated with the production of information and associated with the use of information (related to the decision itself or to the governance, social and economic uncertainties, related to communication and to the evolution of the situation).


(R-317)

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