 Good morning from Vienna and welcome to our social media corner. My name is Diana and I'm the social media manager at IEA. 2021 marks 10 years since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident. Following the accident, the IEA, alongside the nuclear community, worked to promote and ensure that safety was further enhanced at nuclear facilities around the world. Now, a decade later, experts are gathering here in Vienna for a conference to look at lessons learned and actions taken and to identify ways to further strengthen nuclear safety. In this context, the IEA recently launched an essay competition directed at young people related to the current status and future of nuclear safety. And here with me, I have one of the finalists of that competition and also one of our talented youth moderations of the conference. RSA was on preventing regulatory failures to ensure institutional strength in depth. Hi Ilea Eva, thank you so much for joining us here today. Can you tell me more a little bit about yourself and about your professional and academic background? Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me here and for the opportunity to speak here. My name is Ilea Belisasti-Ariso. I'm a nuclear engineer, graduated in Cuba in the Higher Institute of Technologies and Applied Sciences in 2015. I'm actually at the moment doing my master's degree finishing my final dissertation of the thesis and also in the nuclear field. And I was working for five years in the Nuclear Regulatory Authority back in my country in Cuba. And recently I was doing an internship here in the agency in the Radiation Transport and Waste Safety Division for one year until last October. And also, sorry, I'm also representative of the Women in Nuclear Young Generation chapter and one of the IAEA representatives of this chapter also. Very impressive, thank you. In your opinion, why is nuclear safety important and why should young people care about it? Nuclear safety is about prevention, prevention of accidents like Fukushima. We have been here one week hearing all the lessons learned from this accident. But we are also learning, still learning from Chernobyl, for instance, that happened 30 years ago. And people care because safety is about protecting people on the environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation. So it's related to their own safety. That's why people care. And I will answer this by giving you an example. Every time I'm going out there and I'm meeting with friends and they get to know that I'm a nuclear engineer, they're always asking this kind of questions, hard questions to answer related to safety because they know what happened. They know what was the thing that went wrong with the accident. So they care a lot. And if we are trying to involve, we are trying to include nuclear energy as part of the solution for the future, we must ensure that our industry is safe. They recently launched an essay competition directed at young people like you, related to the current status and future of nuclear safety. Do you believe the essay contest was successful? Absolutely. It was very successful. I'm very proud to say that we have 250 participants in this contest. It's amazing. Nuclear professionals, but also students. And from 60 countries and almost 50-50% regarding gender. So it's very, very good numbers, impressive numbers. And we are very proud of that. And also from the panel yesterday, we saw that young people are committed, young people are engaged. We want to talk about nuclear. We know about what happened in the past and we don't want that to happen again. That's why people are so committed and engaged nowadays. And I'm very proud to see that. So I think this essay competition was the demonstration of this kind of thing. Thank you. And also yesterday as part of the conference, there was an event on youth in the nuclear industry. What were some of the most impactful messages you heard during the panel discussion? Well, I was actually, I had the pleasure to moderate this panel yesterday with the six winners of the competition. It was amazing. They were talking about all the issues. They were speaking their minds, like talking about nuclear in the nuclear field. And also one thing that I forgot to say is that in the context, we have young professionals and students from the nuclear field. But we also have people with other backgrounds like journalism, medicine, law, and it's impressive. And they know about this and they were giving us this message. And after the panel, we had the opportunity to split our group into two and then we were discussing about topics that we want to highlight from this conference and it was really awesome. Of course, we talk about the importance of having nuclear as part of the solution. And we have seen young people doing that in Glasgow these two weeks. It's impressive. And we talk about the generational gap that we have. We know that we have this generational gap we want to feel it and we want to contribute with our work and we want to contribute to pushing people to pursue careers in the nuclear field because we know that for the future we will need that. We will need people to qualify. We will need people in this kind of careers and in the nuclear field. Very good. Thank you. And after participating in the conference and they say competition, has your perception or understanding of nuclear safety changed in any way? I won't say it changed, but I will say it improved. In my case, I have been working in the field for many years already. But every time you are attending one congress like this, one event, you are realizing how important is the work that you do. It's incredible and we are still learning and we are going to learn and I'm pretty sure not from accidents but from incidents or whatever it happens. This sharing, this networking that we are doing this is very amazing. For others, because we were talking in the group with other young people. And of course, if they are not in the nuclear field for them, it's amazing to hear and to see experts talking about... It's amazing how safe is our industry but we are still working for making it safer and for them it was a really good thing to learn. And also about communication and I want to emphasize this. Something that is very important and we highlighted in the panel is like we have the tools. We have the content that we want to share but we have to look for a way to share it in the way that young people consume this and we want to work on that and we want to contribute on that because it's our future and it's our... We are the one knowing how to use this technology so it's our duty. Thank you. Now a last question for you. How do you believe the youth community can best support the international community on issues like nuclear safety in the future? Well, I have mentioned already part of this answer. I think first we have to be given the opportunity to speak and this is demonstrating that we have the opportunity and the IAEA is always giving us the opportunity to speak, giving us like a seed and involving us in the decision-making process. It's not just hearing us but giving us a real opportunity to be part of the decision-making process and I'm very glad of that. We can contribute in many ways. We can contribute communication as I mentioned before because I think now we have tools that our parents and grandparents they didn't have so it's our future and it's our responsibility to use them for a better purpose and yeah, of course, events like that demonstrate that we can do it. We can do it and we can speak and we can go out there and try to convince people to pursue careers in nuclear and demonstrate that this is our future and it's part of our future if we want to reach our goals regarding climate change. Thank you so much, Elieva. It was really nice speaking to you today. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll be back tomorrow, last day of the conference, for another live. This time with IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. Until then, follow us on social media to learn more about this conference on lessons learned from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants so we can further strengthen nuclear safety around the world. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you, Elieva.