A flagship initiative of the NEA Global Forum on Nuclear Education are country-specific workshops, which serve as platforms to promote collaboration between national stakeholders comprising of academia, government, civil society and industry to overcome barriers to nuclear education and to outline scenarios for its future. The country-specific workshop programmes typically include keynote speeches, panel discussions, break-out sessions, a concluding session and networking opportunities.
The inaugural country-specific workshop took place in Japan in July 2022, co-organised with the University of Tokyo and Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The workshop explored the relevance and attractiveness of nuclear education programmes, their stability and support within universities, as well as potential ways to increase co-operation between nuclear education programmes, the industry, and the government.
The National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest in Romania hosted the second country specific workshop in October 2023. This workshop focused on how the higher education sector can better align its pedagogy, curriculum, and institutional investment with the needs of the labour market. These discussions have led to the establishment of the National School for Nuclear Energy Association, which was inaugurated in March 2024.
The third country specific workshop was organised in the latter part of October 2023 at the Seoul National University (SNU) in the Republic of Korea, and was co-organised with SNU and the Korea Radioactive Waste Agency (KORAD). The workshop focused on developing curriculum to support strategies for sustainable nuclear fuel cycles and ways forward in creating a national deep geological repository (DGR) programme. The outcome was the formation of a Global Forum Working Group to address the development of curriculum for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle.
