ICONDE seminar in Tallinn
On the 9th and 10th of June, the ICONDE partners met in Estonia for two productive days.
On Thursday, the 9th of June, the ICONDE project team hosted a public seminar to promote the ideas of the ICONDE project. The seminar title was "Development of concrete mixtures for management of hazardous waste, including radioactive waste". The event was held in the Tallinn Office of the University of Tartu right in the city center of Tallinn. Each partner institution - UT, UiT, RTU and LEI - gave a presentation to introduce their work in the ICONDE project. The following topics were covered:
- Overview of the ICONDE project, including the study of radiation shielding characteristics
- Oil shale ash as part of "greener" concretes
- Concrete research and production of specialized concrete types
- Fibers in concrete
- Decommissioning and radioactive waste management at Ignalina nuclear power plant
- Radiation and neutron shielding modeling and experiments in the ICONDE project
The audience included representatives from the Estonian radiation protection regulatory institutions, radioactive waste management facility ALARA (the company promoting nuclear energy production) as well as nuclear scientists from research institutions and radioactive waste management companies. The discussions which started during the presentations continued well into the coffee break. The process of decommissioning Ignalina NPP earned special interest as future plans to construct NPP in Estonia have to consider all the challenges arising throughout the life cycle of NPP including end of life waste management.
On Thursday afternoon, the ICONDE team went for a field trip to Kohtla-Nõmme to visit the Estonian Mining Museum. The guided tour gave all the project partners a good insight into where the oil shale comes from and how it has been mined. On our way back to Tallinn, we also passed the artificial mountains of oil shale mining residues.
Friday was devoted to a project meeting between the ICONDE partners. Once again, we all agreed that a face to face meeting is a nice change from Zoom meetings, more productive and it helped us to plan our future activities in more detail.