Research

The independent, scientific expertise in the field of nuclear safety / nuclear risk, which is based at the Institute for Safety and Risk Sciences (ISR for short), has been a unique selling point in Austria and at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna for many years. Accordingly, technical documents on the nuclear safety of nuclear facilities can be found at the Institute, which are otherwise unavailable or very difficult to obtain in Austria. Due to the advanced age of the people who ran the Institute in its early days and therefore know the provenance and significance of the individual documents, it is important to carry out the archiving work now so that this accumulated university knowledge, which is unique in Europe, is preserved and future generations can benefit from it. In view of the fact that Austria played a leading role in the endeavour to achieve a nuclear-free Central Europe, these documents also represent a part of Austrian history and identity. Some of this knowledge (external and internal documents, reports, publications, etc.), which has been generated since the ISR was founded, is stored on physical data carriers (paper, CDs, discs and other image and sound carriers) in the ISR archives and can currently only be accessed with great effort. The main focus of this project is to make this knowledge and the accumulated data available to the ISR, the BMK and the public in a simple way as a search engine and research tool. To this end, a large part of the material is to be digitised and entered into a flexible database.

The report should characterize on differences in the development and production processes of bioweapons compared to civilian research and production processes and the associated implications for the knowledge and skills of the people involved: - Summarize and analyze existing case studies on the successful use of bioweapons with a view to the effects achieved and the difficulties and “failures” of the various actors (state, state-supported or non-state). - What role does tacit, i.e. experiential knowledge play in the practical implementation of bioweapons production beyond the information available in scientific publications or published protocols? What kind of experience is needed? - What role does practical testing of potential warfare agents play? What is known about actual testing of such agents? - What scientific, technological, personnel and organizational requirements are necessary for the various actors mentioned to be able to develop biological weapons for their purposes at a threatening level? - To what extent can new technologies (e.g. gene editing, AI models, robotized laboratories/“cloud labs”) lower the knowledge and experience threshold for different actors (laypersons, people with academic biological training, trained microbiologists or virologists with laboratory experience in civilian research institutions) to such an extent that they are enabled to develop and produce weaponized biological agents?

The war in Ukraine has shown that nuclear power plants, which are essential for a country's energy infrastructure, can be the target of military attacks. This is despite international agreements designed to prevent attacks on particularly dangerous industrial plants. Although nuclear power plants are designed to withstand external impacts (earthquakes, floods, plane crashes, etc.), acts of war at the reactor site and shelling of buildings on the power plant site, as well as the deliberate destruction of the grid connection, are neither part of the design nor part of the safety analysis of a nuclear power plant. However, Russia's attack on Ukraine has shown that precisely such effects on a nuclear power plant are possible in a military conflict. However, as the effects of war were neither taken into account in the design nor examined in safety and risk analyses, a high level of vulnerability and susceptibility to failure is probable or at least possible. This applies even if neither of the warring parties has the direct intention of destroying the reactor. This project will therefore investigate the consequences of a military impact on a Westinghouse AP-1000 reactor as an example. Reactors of this type of power plant are currently planned in Poland. At the same time, however, Poland is often mentioned in the Russian mass media as a hostile country and a possible further target. Slovenia is also considering the construction of a new NPP, whereby an AP-1000 from Westinghouse is also not ruled out. On the one hand, it will be investigated how hits from weapon systems typically used by Russian combat units affect the containment of the AP-1000. The passive safety concept of the AP-1000 relies on large volumes of water as a heat sink. In order to require only gravitational forces for cooling, these water tanks are located on the roof of the containment. The first step is therefore to investigate what damage could be expected in plausible or extreme scenarios. For this analysis, cooperation with the NBC Defense Center of the Austrian Armed Forces is planned. In addition, it is assumed that there is a complete power failure in the facility (station blackout) as a result of the fighting, as one of the warring parties has damaged the external power supply and the emergency power supply has also been severely damaged. This is highly likely to lead to an accident with core damage and the release of radionuclides into the environment. It is therefore necessary to simulate not only the reactor's thermal-hydraulic system, but also the reactor containment.