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Can you tell us about your role at EDF?
I am an engineer in the reactor doctrine group at the Technical Department of EDF, based in Lyon. I joined this team 3 years ago and I have been working for the EDF group for 19 years. In particular, I spent several years on various power plants in operation.
In a few words, our work revolves around safety relationships for the design of nuclear reactors.
Overall, there are four main activities concerning the existing nuclear fleet and future reactors:
- the drafting of safety report chapters (RDS);
- advisory support to project teams to define security requirements;
- The independent control of certain so-called significant changes in connection with the RDS;
- Steps for validating the elements to be transmitted to ASNR.
What do you like about your job?
It is really very interesting to go deep into a theme, to look for data, to understand the origin of security requirements and to instruct the need to make them evolve as needed.
What are the challenges you face on a daily basis?
Our job requires understanding where the requirement comes from, how it was defined, why it was written in such a way 6 months ago, or 15 years ago. It is a bit of “security archaeology” that can quickly take time to find the reference of the document you are looking for.
Moreover, the safety requirements are quite general and always potentially interpretable because they are expressed in such a way as to cover various configurations. If it was obvious from reading the rule, one would not be asked for an opinion.
To obtain the history of the formulation and meaning of our safety requirements, the memory of our experts is regularly questioned. Their knowledge is valuable and they are the ones who capitalize a lot of knowledge. Without them, it is very complicated to find the origin of the requirements. In other words, we see the menu (the RDS) but we sometimes have trouble finding the recipe!
I think that there is still room for improvement in the capitalization of knowledge. It is important to trace the answers provided. Advice support can sometimes be provided by email with the risk that the information may not be completely transmitted or retained over time or even obsolete later.
What value do you see in Ask EDF?
This tool should allow us to save time on this phase of archaeology. The time saved can be spent on analysis and on topics that have real added value.
The aim is not at all to replace DT experts with AI. Rather, the objective is for Ask EDF to become our gateway as soon as we are asked a question, to find answers already validated by colleagues in the group on the topics of responsibility of the DR group.
This securing of knowledge over time is essential to gain in performance over time with an effective transmission of knowledge.
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