In the past, construction projects were planned on paper. “When thinking back to how complex plants used to be planned, it is easy to imagine how challenging it would have been to determine whether, just from looking at the construction blueprints, a ventilation duct might collide with an intersecting pipeline,” says Alain Bourgeois, former BIM Manager at Nagra.
The acronym BIM stands for Building Information Modelling. “In those days, spatial conflicts were only discovered right at the construction site. Having to solve them then and there caused additional costs and delays,” says Bourgeois, summarising the challenge. The simple above-mentioned example illustrates the purpose of BIM: before the start of actual construction, the project is built in the form of a digital 3D model.
In November 2024, Nagra submitted the general licence applications for a deep geological repository at the Nördlich Lägern site to the federal government. Within the framework described in the application, Nagra will develop the construction project over the next few years. However, planning and constructing a deep geological repository is complex and therefore, from an engineering perspective, far more challenging than a conventional structure. The planning, organisation and management of the construction work alone is expected to amount to millions of work hours. This major project will also involve the services of numerous specialised planning companies: architects, structural engineers, shaft and tunnelling engineers or project controllers – to name just a few.
A project of this magnitude requires collaboration among experts from a wide range of disciplines. All must have access to information and data from the other specialist planners. This creates mutual dependency—or, in other words, a dense network with many interfaces. To ensure this network functions smoothly, a digital construction planning tool is used: BIM.
An all-encompassing platform
In a BIM construction project, the specialist planners develop their plans digitally in 3D. A coordinator continuously merges these three-dimensional models into one all-encompassing model and makes it available to all project members on a virtual work platform – the common data environment. BIM allows assigning any amount of information to each component of the deep geological repository. For example: aside from height and width, the data on a door can also include information on the material, the supplier and maybe even the fire resistance classification. Or, to return to the above-mentioned example with the ventilation duct and the pipeline: if conflicts arise between individual plant components, everyone involved in the planning can point this out. He or she can highlight the relevant location directly in the digital model and use the platform to communicate the problem to those planners who are also impacted by the conflict. Various solutions can then be discussed to resolve the issue.
The BIM method can also be used to develop and visualise detailed planning of the entire construction process. “This allows us to show exactly which part of the deep geological repository will be built when. This is an enormous help in identifying and avoiding bottlenecks at an early stage during the various construction phases,” explains Jürg Neidhardt, Senior Project Lead BIM at Nagra.
Nagra’s dua role
First and foremost, Nagra must take on the role of implementer organisation for the construction of the repository. At the same time, it has spent decades developing scientific and technical expertise in the disposal of radioactive waste. Nagra will therefore have two roles: that of implementer and that of specialist planner for nuclear safety.
To fulfil this dual role, Nagra must ensure that those employees involved in planning know how to use BIM. The first promising applications of the BIM method began in 2018. Since the end of 2021, Nagra has been steadily expanding its digital planning expertise with its own BIM team. Two years ago, the team started developing a workflow that relies on various specialised software programs. It can be used to analyse planning variants for the repository and, if necessary, adapt them much more rapidly than before.
A highlight in 2024 was the launch of a special development project aimed at using computers to semi-automatically create BIM models from key data. “As this eliminates much detailed manual work, the realisation time of such digital models can be massively reduced,” explains Neidhardt. The end product will be a kind of toolbox that Nagra’s future planning partners can use. “Nagra is therefore ideally positioned for the age of digital construction planning,” says Neidhardt.
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