One week with IAEA at ARC-Nucléart
From 22 to 26 November, and despite the surrounding difficulties, we experienced a great and exiting week with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). ARC-Nucléart and CEA-Grenoble hosted no less than three nested events:
- « IAEA Technical Meeting » on Recent Achievements in the Preservation and Consolidation of Cultural Heritage
- IAEA Regional Workshop » on Radiation Technologies for Cultural Heritage Preservation, associating the 4 geographic regions of IAEA Technical Cooperation program (Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, and Africa)
- Celebration of ARC-Nucléart Jubilee which closed on the last day of the week the first two parallel events.
The IAEA meeting and workshop took on a hybrid format with 44 people physically present including 41 foreign visitors from IAEA staff or designated to represent their country from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America and 70 virtual people representing even more countries. In overall, 53 countries were represented.
The first two days brought together the two IAEA events, with presentations of achievements and state of the art in diverse countries. The 3rd and 4th days, participants of Technical meeting and workshops worked separately for new programs definition and technical cooperation in the field. They had also opportunities to visit the CEA Grenoble technology showroom, and more deeply, the facilities of ARC-Nucléart and to see the diversity of interventions that are carried out. Visits of Grenoble Fine Art Museum, Musée Dauphinois and Maison de l’International de Grenoble (hosted in the former Hôtel du Connétable de Lesdiguières) gave them the possibility to see some masterpieces treated with gamma rays, some of them 50 years ago.
Friday was dedicated to celebration of 50 years of activity for ARC-Nucléart. About a hundred people were physically present. The event was also broadcast live in French and English. Everyone could thus follow a rich program, with pioneer’s testimony, success stories, the external view of ARC-Nucléart by some of our outside collaborators and the involvement of ARC-Nucléart in the present and for the future.
The recording of this day is available, in English, here.
These events, the first « physically » at international level for almost all of us from the beginning of pandemic, were possible thanks the constant efforts of IAEA and ARC-Nucléart staffs, with support of many CEA teams from Grenoble and for international. They could not have been possible either without the involvement of participants from the many countries involved.
