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Publicatie Laka-bibliotheek:
Research and Development Expenditure on Nuclear Energy Issues in France 1960-1997

Auteur	WISE Paris
	-
Datum	februari 1998
Classificatie	2.02.0.00/60 (FRANKRIJK - ALGEMEEN)
Voorkant

R&D expenses on nuclear in France        WISE-Paris, February 1998

• THE FRENCH R&D ON NUCLEAR ENERGY:
no precise definition and no clear figures

To describe and analyse Research and Development (R&D) expenditures on nuclear 
energy, one needs to know what is exactly designed as "R&D", and to identify 
relevant data corresponding to that definition.

For many reasons, this is not very obvious: to define R&D measures as such may 
be easy (say for instance fundamental and applied research conducted in view of 
developing new industrial tools), but then finding the corresponding data proves to 
be difficult and most of the time impossible - while from the easily available data it 
is hard to extract R&D expenses. We will detail the kind of obstacles we found as 
we explain the methodological approach and choices we took.

1. The characterization of nuclear R&D

The "research and development" package usually describes ·all of the systematic 
tasks (in an institution, an industrial company, or at a national. level) to increase 
both scientific and technical knowledge and the use of this knowledge to improve 
existing tools or to develop new ones (products, materials, systems, process...) 
for industry.

Three steps can be distinguished:

- the fundamental or basic research (ie research in fundamental disciplines) which
is aimed at improving the basic data and the comprehension of phenomena and 
modelizing them - that is for instance neutronics;
- the applied research, which is still focused on general phenomena, but studied in
the perspective of application - for instance the studies about irradiation of nuclear 
fuel; - the development research, which is devoted to one particular industrial 
project - like the development of a new reactor system.

But this characterization, for it is a clear definition however simple it might be, 
leads to fairly unclear determination of who is doing R&D and where.

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