Following its establishment in April 2025, the NEA project on Waste Integration for Small and Advanced Reactor Designs (WISARD) held its first technical workshop in Washington, DC, on 4-6 November 2025. The workshop was hosted by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), one of the WISARD signatory organisations, and included an open session dedicated to discussions with the NEI Advanced Nuclear Forum (ANF).

At its inception, the WISARD project brought together 12 signatory organisations across three continents representing national laboratories, research institutes, industry players and startups. In addition, multiple third parties contribute to implementation of the project programme of work.

The main objectives of the WISARD project are to evaluate the compatibility of used fuel and waste streams from SMRs and Generation IV reactors with existing waste management solutions and to support international collaboration on the rapidly evolving landscape of next-generation nuclear technologies. The yearly technical workshops are a central component of the project, enabling participants to review progress and collectively examine potential back-end pathways for new nuclear systems.

During the workshop, participants reviewed the WISARD Task programmes of work, developed over the first six months of the project, which include contributions from all participating organisations. The six WISARD Tasks will focus on:

Irradiated fuel and coolant characterisation
Treatment and reprocessing
Storage
Transportation
Disposal
Cross-cutting integration and interdependencies across the project

The workshop participants considered the list of systems and fuel types to be characterised by Task 1 and evaluated across the other WISARD Tasks. They discussed the proposed waste management strategies for storage, transportation, and disposal of the different waste forms, as well as the potential treatment and reprocessing pathways.

During the meeting of the WISARD Management Board held directly after the technical workshop, Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit gGmbH (GRS) were approved as a new WISARD project signatory. GRS will contribute to the project’s work in the areas of storage and transportation.

The next WISARD technical workshop will be held in November 2026 in Daejeon, Korea, hosted by Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd (KHNP). A separate open NEA workshop will be held in tandem with this event, focusing on the back-end impacts of reprocessing for advanced nuclear technologies. Further details on this workshop will be available in early 2026.

As of the 26 November 2025, the signatory members of WISARD are: Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL, Canada), Saltfoss Energy (Denmark), VTT Technical Research Centre (Finland), Naarea (France), Gesellschaft für Anlagen- und Reaktorsicherheit gGmbH (GRS, Germany), Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI, Korea), Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., Ltd. (KHNP, Korea), Blykalla (Sweden), United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL, UK), Nuclear Waste Services (NWS, United Kingdom), Deep Isolation (United States), the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI, United States), and the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI, United States).