The CONFIDENCE project

The H2020 CONFIDENCE Project aims to close existing gaps in several areas of emergency management and long-term rehabilitation associated with large-scale accidental releases of radioactivity into the environment. It concentrates on the early and transition phases of an emergency, but considers also longer- term decisions made during these phases. The work-programme of CONFIDENCE was defined with the objective to understand, reduce and cope with the uncertainty of meteorological and radiological data and their further propagation in decision support systems. This includes atmospheric dispersion, dose estimation, foodchain modelling and countermeasure simulations models. Consideration of social, ethical and communication aspects related to uncertainties is a key aspect of the project. Improvements in modelling and combining simulation with monitoring will help gain a more comprehensive picture of the radiological situation and will clearly improve decision making under uncertainties. Decision making principles and methods will be investigated, ranging from formal decision aiding techniques to simulation based approaches. These will be demonstrated and tested in stakeholder workshops applying the simulation tools developed within CONFIDENCE. A comprehensive education and training programme is fully linked with the research activities. To date, ensemble modelling for atmospheric dispersion has started, monitoring approaches have been developed and advanced foodchain models investigated. Stakeholder panels were set up to investigate the development of sensible countermeasure strategies, define important attributes for decision making and first investigations about mental models (theoretical framework to understand behaviour of people) were performed. Multi-criteria decision tools have been improved for uncertainty handling and our first training courses have been prepared [https://eu-neris.net/home/newsletters/171-confidence-training-course-2.html]. CONFIDENCE is part of CONCERT. This project has received funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018 under grant agreement No 662287.