DOE OSTI2020
Project and megaproject management in the energy sector have historically focused on the planning and delivery of the construction of infrastructure. Therefore, policies are predominantly oriented to support the construction of infrastructure rather than its decommissioning. However, globally, several facilities have reached (or will soon reach) their end-of-life and need to be decommissioned. These facilities span across the energy sector, including nuclear power plants and oil and gas rigs, whose decommissioning present unprecedented techno-socio-economic challenges. Moreover, globally, their decommissioning cost is estimated to reach hundreds of billions of US dollars and this budget keeps increasing, with limited knowledge-transfer across industries to mitigate the spiraling increase of this figure. Cross-sectorial knowledge-transfer is a way to tackle this matter and improve the planning and delivery of decommissioning and waste management projects. The aim of this research is to build a road-map based on cross-sectorial industrial experience, designed to promote the sharing of good practices between projects both within and across industries dealing with major decommissioning and waste management challenges. To reach this aim, the tacit knowledge of senior practitioners on several large scale nuclear and oil and gas decommissioning projects is made explicit by the means of semi-structured interviews, systematically analyzed through directed content analysis. The results of this analysis include a list of good practices that could and should be transferred to nuclear decommissioning projects, including the need to promote the adoption of incentives explicitly linked to the project deliverables, and to develop long-term plans to support smooth transition from operations to decommissioning. Suggestions about how the knowledge-transfer can be promoted within and across organizations are also discussed. In this way, this research provides practical guidance for project managers and policymakers on how to support the planning and delivery of projects with improved performance. (authors)
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗