INTERNATIONAL CONVENTIONS AND SAFETY STANDARDS 1. Joint Convention

The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management came into force in 2001. It represents a commitment by the participating States to achieve and maintain a consistently high level of safety in the management of spent fuel and of radioactive waste [9]. At present, 41 States have ratified the Joint Convention.

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON SPENT FUEL MANAGEMENT

Although this represents less than 30% of the IAEA Member States, these countries contain about 97% of the commercial spent fuel being generated.

Details of the results of the second review meeting of the Joint Convention will be presented in another paper [10]. During the review meeting the Contracting Parties demonstrated their commitment to improving policies and practices, inter alia, their national strategies for spent fuel management and their engagement with stakeholders and the public. Indeed, it was stated in the report of the review meeting that “many Contracting Parties have already developed, or are currently developing, spent fuel and waste management strategies based on increasingly comprehensive inventories”.

The success of the Joint Convention will depend on the rigour with which the reviews are performed in order to make accidents and incidents in the area of spent fuel and radioactive waste management as unlikely as possible.

Learning from experience and improving the review process with time is essential. It is also important that all countries managing spent fuel and radioactive waste ratify the Joint Convention in order to benefit from the experience of other countries.

5.2. Safety standards

Safety standards are the foundation that underpins the international safety regime and, in that regard, the development of a complete corpus of safety standards is one of the key factors for assuring that safety is maintained in the spent fuel management area.

Currently, most spent fuel is stored on-site at nuclear power plants. In addition, spent fuel in some countries is stored at reprocessing facilities or other centralized locations. Both of these storage strategies can be expected to be in place for the next several decades, and the safety standards have to address both situations.

Although there are numerous safety standards concerned with different aspects of safety at nuclear power plants, for research reactors and radioactive waste management, there are only a few which address spent fuel management.

The existing safety standards on spent fuel storage are more than 10 years old and need to be updated. Also, no comprehensive guidance on criticality safety is available within the safety standards series. It is necessary, therefore, to take a fresh look at the needs, at the international level, for safety standards and guidance for spent fuel management.

The transport of spent fuel has been a practice for many years and the safety standards for the transport casks are prescribed in the IAEA Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Material [11]. The develop-ments taking place in the combined use of spent fuel casks for storage and

transport and possibly even for disposal will require a new approach. The design standards for long term storage casks and those for transport casks need to be harmonized.

6. EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

In addition to working to ensure that spent fuel management activities are carried out in as safe a manner as possible, the concept of defence in depth demands that appropriate emergency preparedness activities be implemented to cover the possibility of a failure in the operational safety system. Emergency preparedness is the final barrier to ensuring the safety of workers and the public. It includes actions to prevent, to mitigate and to respond to unantici-pated transients, which means, in the context of spent fuel management, being able to address the potential emergency situations associated with fission control, heat removal and radiation safety.

For all practical purposes, the emergency preparedness arrangements associated with the operation of a nuclear power plant or a research reactor fully encompass the spent fuel issue. They include being able to address unplanned events in spent fuel pools, in dry cask storage facilities, at reproc-essing plants and during transportation. All nuclear installations are designed to include a strategy on how to safely store spent fuel on-site until it can be moved to a more permanent location. Additionally, since the events of 11 September 2001 in the USA, the vulnerabilities of spent fuel storage facilities to external threats have been reconsidered. Many compensating measures have been put into place in this regard — this includes improvements in security measures (as a preventative action) and improvements in the safety measures to preclude any incidents or events (reactive actions).

It is also important to have response measures that are appropriate and well exercised. Such measures must address both the security and safety considerations associated with spent fuel. Integrated response plans have been developed and rehearsed, and improvements in the design and maintenance of backup systems have been undertaken.

Given the long time perspective for storage, it is necessary to provide assurance that the final barrier, the emergency plan implementing procedures and the bases for the plan are not forgotten. The commitment to ensuring a viable emergency preparedness and response programme during the possibly prolonged periods of time associated with storage must be maintained.

The expected increased number of transports of spent fuel, sometimes over long distances, raises some new issues, possibly involving States that do not operate nuclear power plants and emergency response centres. Along the

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON SPENT FUEL MANAGEMENT

routes of transport, a sufficient number of emergency response centres that could reach the site of the emergency at short notice to provide ‘first aid’

should be established. These response centres should be linked to a central emergency response agency which has the capability to organize the required personnel and equipment for the affected site within a short period of time.