Preserving nuclear knowledge in CIS countries: its current status and future prospects

Abstract

The continued focus of the activities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in managing nuclear knowledge is on supporting member states in analysing the need for nuclear knowledge preservation, estimating the current status of existing problems and suggesting the common approaches towards them. The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has been a part of a larger nuclear knowledge community within the former USSR. These states now have a lot in common in terms of nuclear energy industry and especially nuclear knowledge management. A peculiar feature of the present situation is the significant amount of scientific texts and normative documents (standards, guides, methodologies, etc.) available only in Russian. In addition, most current nuclear professionals in atomic science and technology received their fundamental education in the Russian language. Given this fact, the CIS Commission for the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy raised the Nuclear Knowledge Management (NKM) problem and requested its secretariat to work with the IAEA to estimate the current status of the NKM problem in former USSR countries and work out a common approach to deal with it. This article refers to the IAEA publication on the topic and provides information to organisations and experts working in the field of NKM on the common approaches and possible solutions in preserving nuclear knowledge in CIS countries.