Knowledge Management in the Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE)

With completion of the restructuring of the nuclear waste disposal landscape in Germany, the competences for construction and running of repositories for radioactive waste products are since 2017 with the Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE). The BGE has over 50 years of experience in the disposal of nuclear waste in Germany. Over a period of several decades substantial effort was put into the research and developmental work on nuclear waste disposal in Germany, which led to a considerable state of knowledge, both thematically and quantitatively; however, so far no consistent overview exists on the various works and therefore on the total state of knowledge, as these works only partially exist or existed in the very different organizations (diffuse and local) within the nuclear waste disposal landscape. The emerging loss of specialist knowledge in Germany caused by the withdrawal from nuclear energy and the recession of national mining activities is doing the rest. This imminent loss of knowledge must be taken into consideration as a critical factor, especially considering the age structure within the BGE and the simultaneously occurring processes on selection of a site for disposal of highly radioactive waste products. For this reason, in the division of research and development/knowledge management (R&D/KM) an independent department for knowledge management was created in order to establish an infrastructure for knowledge management and a connection between knowledge management platforms and knowledge carriers in the company. In addition to the collection and distribution of the available knowledge, current results from research and development are also to be fed into the “learning organization”. For this purpose, knowledge management provides a digital information basis, into which current results from research and development are also entered as a knowledge store. This knowledge store consisting of over 14 000 documents, contains mostly research reports and scientific publications, which are concerned with diverse topics for the final disposal of radioactive waste products in geological formations. The total stock of internal company documents available can be accessed with a browser-based text analysis software. Intelligent search algorithms render the textual contents accessible, combine them with synonyms and dictionaries deposited in the system and make the resulting hits of the search queries available for the user in order of importance in summarized and full text versions. Using specific query terms, as known from search machines or library servers, this software analyzes the available documents of the digital information basis and in a brief summary of results, in addition to a brief description of the contents, the naming of relevant keywords, the identification of sources, compilers, institutions, knowledge carriers and an extended optimized information analysis of hits, also provides the possibility to retrieve the complete document and the download. The research options can, in addition to the queries via the established internet search engines also be combined with queries via the incorporated information or databank catalogue of national and international scientific institutions or libraries, which are concerned with research programs relevant for repositories. In order to further increase and optimize the information possibilities for employees of the BGE, a variety of knowledge landscapes has been implemented in the intranet, which enable specific queries on topics, expert information, institution, country and persons. Using these tools a first essential target of knowledge management, the collection, availability and distribution of written down knowledge in the company has been achieved. For the development of person-related and group-related knowledge the department of knowledge management is compiling concepts, which can only be implemented together and jointly with them, as they border on certain interfaces in the organization/company. This particularly concerns measures that fall into the areas of human resources, such as personnel management and personnel strategies or in the area of the particular project; keyword lessons learnt.