Assessing Safety and Sustainability of a Monitoring System for Nuclear Waste Management

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 13; pp. 120486 - 120505
• Main Authors: Giovanni, Michele Di, Verde, Laura, Campanile, Lelio, Romoli, Mauro, Sabbarese, Carlo, Marrone, Stefano
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2025
• Subjects: Computer architecture; Decision support system; Decision support systems; Internet of Things; Monitoring; monitoring system; pre-disposal nuclear waste; Protection; Radioactive pollution; Safety; safety assessment; sustainability assessment; Sustainable development; Unified modeling language
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3586735

Nowadays, nuclear technologies are increasingly being integrated into industry, healthcare and manufacturing. As a side effect, waste materials are produced according to standard processes which are subject to international regulations. One of the most critical phases is the pre-disposal, due to the uncertainty related to the evolution of the materials and their potential impact on environmental protection. This paper introduces the architecture of a monitoring system able to accomplish safety goals and to guarantee energetic sustainability. The possibility of defining different system configurations (e. g., sensor scheduling policies, geometry of the sites, trustworthiness of the sensors) fosters a high adaptability to several monitoring scenarios, being characterised by different safety and sustainability levels. A methodology, integrating a model-based approach with data collection and processing, is proposed to quantitatively evaluate system configurations. This methodology is based on the definition of two metrics - one for safety and one for sustainability - and an assessment model. The model computes the metrics considering geometry of the place, scheduling and trustworthiness of monitoring sensors. This is a first step in the construction of a Decision Support System able to aid human operators in assessing system configurations and finding possible safety/sustainability trade-offs. A case study is used to show the feasibility of the approach: some configurations are evaluated on the real plant, placed at Řež in the Czech Republic, assessing them on the base of the defined metrics.