ctive manner. Equally importantly, these missioning efforts also served to test and optimize decontamination and disassembly techniques and to create a ‘missioning market’ including specialized suppliers and contractors. Over a decade of major missioning activity, technology has advanced considerably and has benefited from parallel development in other industrial fields such as electronics, robotics puting. New missioning techniques have emerged and are ready to face the challenges of the year 2000 and beyond, when a number of mercial facilities will reach the end of their operational lifetime and e candidates for missioning (Figs 1, 2). As a result of the time which has elapsed since the publication of preliminary IAEA reports in the field of missioning technologies and the implementation