Interview with Claudio Pescatore,
an Italian nuclear professional in France

Claudio Pescatore holds a degree in Physics from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Illinois. In his international career, primarily between the United States and France, Claudio Pescatore was responsible for the performance assessment group for radioactive waste repositories at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1981 to 1992. Subsequently, he held various positions at the Nuclear Energy Agency, including Principal Administrator for radioactive waste management and decommissioning. Claudio is an international expert with over 40 years of experience in radioactive waste management and decommissioning.

1. Claudio, throughout your career, you've encountered various countries and different aspects of the field of nuclear energy. The fact that you began your training in Italy and now live in France makes you a "nuclear professional in France," but in your case, aside from the fact that you worked in the USA for fifteen years, the qualification may be somewhat limiting. Your contributions - as evidenced by your work - include, but also go beyond, the disciplines usually defined as "nuclear science and technology." Do you think your career reflects in any way the particularities of the Italian educational system, which, compared to others, may be more open and flexible?

Our education system, while proposing disciplinary orientations from the end of compulsory schooling (technical, linguistic, classical, scientific, artistic, etc.), does so by preserving, in each curriculum and to a reasonable extent, something of the others, maintaining a certain attention towards so-called general culture. So, an Italian who has completed high school and then earned a university degree, regardless of their field of specialization, may have solid knowledge of other disciplines. This means that even a “technician” retains some humanistic aspects (and naturally, the opposite is also true). According to the italian saying "learn the art and put it aside," one day it may turn useful even professionally.

2. How do you think things are in France? From your point of view, what are the virtues of a class of technically prepared executives, extremely specialized, whose education is characterized by a clear and early professionalization, compared to professionals equally prepared but with a broader spectrum of interests and skills, sometimes bordering on areas far from the exercise of the profession?

The Italian education system does indeed allow for eclectic educational paths, to a certain extent, providing a rather broad preparation. I graduated from a classical high school and then obtained a degree in physics. At that time, it was thought that with a classical high school diploma, one could excel in all university courses, whereas in France, priority was given to a scientific high school diploma. At the beginning of university courses, I could translate perfectly from ancient Greek but didn't know what a derivative was. However, I successfully overcame the difficulties this entailed. After a few years dedicated to neutron calculations and their extension to rarefied gases, I specialized in the USA in the properties of nuclear glasses, also training in fields linked to nuclear waste disposal, such as hydrogeology and materials science. To be tackled holistically and productively, final disposal of waste requires reflections and skills broader than those strictly engineering-scientific of everyday life. For example, the timescales involved don't allow for the adoption of usual - albeit not trivial - modelling and simulation methods, and even require assuming epistemological postures incompatible with the naive scientism that sometimes appears in people who have studied scientific disciplines without ever asking themselves what kind of knowledge science can bring to light. It's very likely that the education I received in Italy partly prepared me to address the type of problems raised by geological waste disposal, at least by fostering my appetite for some aspects of the problem that elude strictly technical approaches. That said, I couldn't say whether the Italian education system is more effective than, for example, the French one, which, in addition to its tendency to provide a very clear and fairly early disciplinary direction, it is also characterized by its elitism. In France, a certain eclecticism is found in the so-called "grandes écoles," high-level secondary educational institutions that provide very broad preparations in terms of disciplinary spectrum, combining so-called curricular subjects with complementary disciplines that contribute to the training of the ruling class. It's not unusual for a polytechnicien or a normalien to have taken courses in sociology, philosophy, etc. Of course, in France, this approach is reserved for elites, and I wouldn't say that, from the perspective of society's functioning and - in particular - public administration, this yields unsatisfactory results.

3.     There are several things that make the nuclear industry very special compared to others. Firstly, it carries the burden of being perceived by many as a by-product of a weapon of mass destruction. Moreover, despite being required – in many countries, including France, and rightly so - to take responsibility for the waste it produces over very long time horizons, it is still considered by a significant portion of the population as a potential cause of harmful environmental consequences. I have the impression that if nuclear experts remain entrenched in their field of specialization, it's practically impossible for the nuclear professional community to break through the doubts or reservations of those who are unconvinced or even opposed to the use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes.

Do you think technical experts should also be able to explain the meaning of their profession and their technological beliefs to people engaged in entirely different domains, and furthermore, should they strive to comprehend the motivations of others, even when those motivations extend into psychological realms that are sometimes detached from the rationality of science? In doing so, should they adopt a stance that is not only technical but also humanistic?

Absolutely. There's no doubt that the technician must understand how nuclear is perceived by non-specialists and be able to understand the questions that society legitimately raises and therefore to dialogue with it, avoiding entrenching themselves in the unproductive conviction of being in the right. Nuclear, precisely because of the problems it raises and its potential to solve some challenges of enormous magnitude, must be integrated into society, rather than being isolated from it. Engineers must not only be able to show confidence in the analyses they propose, but they must also feel the need to argue for and spread their confidence, even within areas of thought that may be hostile.. In the case of geological repositories for radioactive waste, when I worked at the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the OECD I tried to affirm this principle by creating and promoting, the "Forum of Stakeholder Confidence." Also during that time, I introduced, as part of the safety analysis of geological repositories, the concept of a "safety case," which is broader and encompasses the old concept of "performance assessment." Through the "safety case," we aim not only to detail the technical-scientific knowledge and analyses but also to illustrate the confidence of specialists in a particular storage site design, for example, by developing the technical reasons that led to each choice, their robustness, and the reasons why it prevailed over alternative options. This aspect is fundamental because, as mentioned earlier, it's difficult to base such analyses on irrefutable demonstrations simply because the time scales involved in these types of installations don't reasonably allow them to be reproducible like scientific experiments would be. Thus, in principle, the "safety case" must illustrate the paths that led to the definition of the design, indicating which doubts arose and was resolved to arrive at a specific proposal and, at the same time, provide evidence of confidence in various technical choices. Also part of this “modus operandi” is the concept of reversibility, introducing into the design and management of the project the possibility to readjust or even reverse each decision if new facts indicate that a given choice is no longer adequate or that other options prove to be more appropriate.

4.     You have delved into the transmission of information, knowledge, and memory regarding nuclear waste repositories. Today, we may have an idea of the information that needs to be preserved and transmitted to future generations, but those future generations will likely have a different perspective on the same issues. Imagining the evolution of thought and society - and therefore the type of information needed hundreds or thousands of years from now - requires not only technical reasoning but also sociological, even anthropological hypotheses, questioning what should be the most useful and effective future memory of the past. These types of considerations are typically beyond the cultural scope of a technician. Yet, they are crucial issues, not only for society but also for the industry contributing to long-term storage solutions. I believe that the disposition (structured by education) to be interested in these aspects and the disciplines that allow for their effective examination gives great value to a training that preserves a part of eclecticism. What do you think?

I agree that an eclectic cultural background enhances one's ability to address these issues. However, the necessity to speculate about future societies in order to determine the most effective method of preserving memory may be less imperative than one might think. The information considered relevant - avoiding overly restrictive assumptions - will be transmitted with a scheme that can be updated and passed down from one generation to another. For example, in the case of high-activity, long-lived radioactive waste geological storage sites, the information could be structured on three levels:

·   Detailed technical information

·   Succinct extract of technical information

·   Information on the process that led to the definition of the waste storage approach and site design needed to accommodate them, including discussions with various stakeholders.

This third level would be summarized in a Key Information File (KIF), which is reviewed and updated periodically to incorporate new relevant details and emerging aspects over time. The KIF would also provide indications on the location of similar deposits in other nations and on centres where information is collected. Keeping this documentation alive in different places, in different languages, and on different formats is crucial. However, relying solely on one method of transmission would not be safe. It would be necessary to conceive and implement other complementary ways of transmitting both memory and information aimed at restoring it in case of loss. The only way to ensure that a fact or an artifact becomes part of collective memory is for it to permeate society until it becomes part of the traditional apparatus, i.e., the system of practices and collective memories transmitted in multiple ways, more or less institutionalized: from documents to stories, from history to representation, from steles to archives and Time Capsules. These considerations, evidently, do not apply solely to the memory of geological storage sites and would be equally useful for other types of hazardous waste or materials (from mercury storage to landmines scattered across the planet). The principles of sustainable development as outlined by the United Nations do not address memory. The fact that future generations will need information to manage waste generated in relatively distant past eras is not taken into account. This is, for the moment, a lack that is not sufficiently understood and could prove to be serious. Memory must be part of the discourse on sustainable development