The WNE Innovation Awards is a prestigious ceremony that aims to showcase the key players in the civil nuclear industry who have demonstrated excellence and innovation in different fields. It is a unique opportunity to recognize the remarkable achievements of the industry and promote innovation in this sector. Know-how, mastery, agility and innovation are the keywords that encourage the civil nuclear sector to move towards a more responsible and less carbon-intensive world!

Find here the WNE INNOVATION AWARDS rules.

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The categories

The juries

The 2023 winners

Nuclear safety is a term defining all activities related to improving and/or maintaining the integrity of the mechanisms, processes, tools or instruments containing radioactive material, to protect people and the environment from harmful effects.

This definition is not only restricted to nuclear sites. This Award is also open to applications dealing with logistics, manufacturing, components (non-exhaustive list) which bring additional nuclear safety to a global process.

Operational excellence is a systematic and methodical approach led inside the company in order to maximize performance in terms of productivity, quality of products and reliability, nuclear safety, and more generally of performance...

It is defined as an integrated, systematic approach to identifying, acquiring, transforming, developing, disseminating, using, sharing, and preserving knowledge, relevant to achieving specified objectives.

Knowledge Management (KM) has been introduced to the nuclear industry as a response to the aging nuclear industry workforce, where the generation that designed, commissioned and initially operated these plants has begun to reach retirement age. KM tools for capture and transfer of knowledge from this aging workforce to its younger replacements have been emphasized.

While KM has certainly been used successfully for this purpose, KM has a larger, on-going application over the life of an NPP and beyond and this requirement is now a key feature of future workforce planning and development criteria for the New Nuclear Build programmes. Knowledge is often described as either Explicit, Implicit and Tacit categories.

In this category, “Products” are defined as “technology bricks” or technological building blocks which will contribute to shape the present and future nuclear technology facilities, such as that cannot be qualified as “product” any project of a fully designed reactor. “Services” includes all processes and methods of an organization. The products and services can be located anywhere along the nuclear value chain.

The OECD, in its Oslo manual, defines innovation as the “implementation” of a new or significantly improved product (good or service) or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations.

Therefore, the quality of innovation of the products and services will be determined based on the solution they provide. Each application will have to demonstrate the key differentiator of their innovation, with a comparison of its proposed cases of use with current ones, providing clear evidence of how the proposed product/service sets itself apart from existing solutions.