CURRENT INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM FOR SAFE DECOMMISSIONING

At present there is a growing de facto international system (or regime) aimed at the safe termination of practices and the safe decommissioning of their facilities. This regime can be described as follows:

— A system of international binding legal obligation undertaken by parties of relevant international conventions;

— A corpus of international radiation safety standards established by the IAEA, and provisions for the application of these standards.

3.1. International conventions

There are in force four legally binding conventions relevant to radiation safety, which impose radiation safety obligations to their State Parties, with some requirements being related to the safe termination of practices and decommissioning of their installations. These are the:

— Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident,

— Convention on Assistance in the Case of Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency,

— Convention on Nuclear Safety,

— Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management (the ‘Joint Convention’).

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TABLE I. NON-POWER APPLICATION FACILITIES, FOR EXAMPLE RADIOTHERAPY

Developing Developed Total

countries countries

Number of countries 132 (81%) 30 (19%) 162

Radiotherapy centres 2327 (44%) 2986 (56%) 5313

Teletherapy 2195 (35%) 4097 (65%) 6292

60Co and ¹³⁷Cs 1424 (69%) 634 (31%) 205

Accelerators 771 (18%) 3463 (82%) 4234

Brachytherapy 845 (34%) 1652 (66%) 2497

While none of these conventions includes specific, legally binding undertakings with regard to termination of practices and decommissioning of their installations, the Joint Convention has certain closely linked obligations.

For that reason, it is important to underline the statement of the conference’s President, which implied that it is vital for the purposes of this conference that countries accede to the Joint Convention as soon as possible.

3.2. International safety standards

The international community can also benefit from a hierarchical corpus of global standards on radiation safety, which are established by the IAEA and have been growing since the middle of the last century. The first standards were issued by the IAEA in 1962. At that time, the standards were prospective in nature, and the notion of “termination of the practice” hardly appeared, even implicitly. Therefore, the concept of “safe decommissioning” was not addressed in that early document, in its first revision in 1967, or in the fundamental revision of 1982, when a new system of dose limitation was introduced. The concept was not even dealt with in the first international fundamental principles for radiation safety issued in 1996, or in the current international requirements governing radiation safety globally, the ‘International Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Ionizing Radiation and for the Safety of Radiation Sources’ (BSS)¹. However, in spite of this apparent lack of basic international standardization for safe decommissioning, the IAEA has produced supporting specific requirements for the predisposal management of radioactive waste, which address decommissioning issues, and particular guides for the safe decommissioning of nuclear power plants and research reactors, for nuclear fuel cycle facilities and even for medical, industrial and research facilities.

The overall system of international radiation safety standards operates in a very transparent and sophisticated manner (Fig. 2):

— The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) provides estimates of the biological effects attributed to radiation exposure, which are periodically reported to the UN General Assembly in large volumes containing the up to date infor-mation in this scientific field.

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1The BSS are jointly sponsored by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, the IAEA, the International Labour Organization, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization.

— The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) pro-vides basic recommendations on radiation protection, which are available in the public literature;

— On the basis of UNSCEAR estimates and ICRP recommendations, the IAEA establishes the relevant international standards.

The IAEA process for establishing safety standards is very complex because it involves the participation of regulators from all over the world, as well as other relevant sister organizations within the United Nations family, but it is also very transparent. It involves four committees, one on nuclear safety standards, one on radiation safety, one on waste safety and one on transport safety, all of them supported by expert groups and a supervising commission that provides the ultimate approval of the standards before they are endorsed by the IAEA policy making organs.

In summary, the international community has a very elaborate system of international radiation safety standards, which are being established under the aegis of the IAEA, but the system needs to be strengthened in the area of the safe termination of practices and decommissioning of their installations. In fact, this system is not complete in the area of decommissioning, and the reason is

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FIG. 2. The international system of radiation safety standards.

that quantified criteria for decommissioning have not yet been developed and established internationally. This is a lapse in the system that hopefully this conference will address. The obvious question is: if the international community has been able to develop over the years a sophisticated and widely applied radiation safety approach, why has such an approach not evolved in the field of the safe termination of practices and decommissioning of their facilities?

4. BASIC INTERNATIONAL RADIATION SAFETY APPROACH