NO ‘SHIP AND FORGET’

The transfers of nuclear waste from an exporting country to the host country of an interim storage facility or of a final repository would be done under various bilateral or multilateral agreements at the commercial and governmental levels. All participating countries would presumably be signatories of the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management

MULTINATIONAL APPROACHES RELEVANT TO SPENT FUEL MANAGEMENT

and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management (the Joint Convention), the major legal instrument existing in the field [2].

The Joint Convention applies to spent fuel and radioactive waste resulting from civilian nuclear reactors and applications and to spent fuel and radioactive waste from military or defence programmes, if and when such materials are transferred permanently to and managed within exclusively civilian programmes, or when declared as spent fuel or radioactive waste for the purpose of the Convention by the Contracting Party. The Convention also applies to planned and controlled releases into the environment of liquid or gaseous radioactive materials from regulated nuclear facilities.

The obligations of the Contracting Parties with respect to the safety of spent fuel and radioactive waste management are based to a large extent on the principles contained in the IAEA’s Safety Fundamentals publication on The Principles of Radioactive Waste Management [3], published in 1995. They include, in particular, the obligation to establish and maintain a legislative and regulatory framework to govern the safety of spent fuel and radioactive waste management, and the obligation to ensure that individuals, society at large and the environment are adequately protected against radiological and other hazards, inter alia, by appropriate siting, design and construction of facilities and by making provisions for ensuring the safety of facilities both during their operation and after their closure. The Joint Convention imposes obligations on Contracting Parties in relation to the transboundary movement of spent fuel and radioactive waste, based on the concepts contained in the IAEA Code of Practice on the International Transboundary Movement of Radioactive Waste [4].

The Joint Convention addresses the international aspects of waste management, e.g.:

Preamble (xi)

“Convinced that radioactive waste should, as far as is compatible with the safety of the management of such material, be disposed of in the State in which it was generated, whilst recognising that, in certain circumstances, safe and efficient management of spent fuel and radioactive waste might be fostered through agreements among Contracting Parties to use facilities in one of them for the benefit of the other Parties, particularly where waste originates from joint projects”

Article 1 — Objectives

“The objectives of this Convention are:

(i) to achieve and maintain a high level of safety worldwide in spent fuel and radioactive waste management, through the enhancement of national

measures and international co-operation, including where appropriate, safety related technical co-operation;”

The Joint Convention does not envisage an international verification system to ensure that national waste facilities respect the safety requirements spelled out in the Convention, whether or not a national facility contains foreign waste. However, it may be predicted that facilities containing foreign waste would be verified to some degree by the exporting countries. For domestic and international political reasons there would be a need for some kind of monitoring of spent fuel storage and disposal (even waste) after shipment, to provide political protection of the exporting country from accusations such as ‘irresponsible dumping’. It is clear that an international waste management solution would not be of a simple commercial nature along the lines of ‘ship and forget’.

The IAEA Expert Group on Multilateral Approaches, brought together by the IAEA’s Director General in 2004–2005, took a serious look at this matter and it supported the principle of multilateral storage and disposal arrangements:

“The IAEA could facilitate this arrangement by acting as a ‘technical inspection agency’ assuring the suitability of the facility and applying state-of-the-art safeguards control and inspections”. ([1], para. 304)

“It is also important that international oversight of an MNA be arranged, as needed, to achieve confidence of partners on adequate safety and physical security of the proposed facility”. ([1], para. 339)

In several cases, domestic policy in the customer’s State would require explicit assurances that the transferred waste will be properly managed and not simply dumped at some distant site. This would, in particular, be the case for Switzerland. The new Swiss Nuclear Law, which came into force in February 2005, addresses the issue in its Article 33:

“A permit will be granted for the export of nuclear waste…, when the following conditions are fulfilled…:

The recipient State has approved the import of nuclear waste under a government-to-government agreement;

A suitable nuclear installation is available in the recipient State satisfying up-to-date scientific and technical standards;

Transit States have approved such transports;

MULTINATIONAL APPROACHES RELEVANT TO SPENT FUEL MANAGEMENT

The sender has firmly agreed with the recipient of nuclear waste — with the endorsement of the authority designated by the Swiss Government — that such waste may be returned to the sender in case of necessity.”

Should Switzerland choose to export waste, the second condition above would clearly oblige the Federal Government to ascertain, in one way or the other, that the installation is and remains ‘suitable’ and that it will satisfy state of the art technical requirements and standards.

What is remarkable in this law is the mirror clause applying to the import of nuclear waste. Import will indeed be possible, under the same conditions as spelled out in Article 33. This is not too surprising. With a strong chemical industry, Switzerland has long experience in bi-directional international transfers of toxic waste, with the routine import and export of various kinds of waste, and in ensuring the optimization and specialization of disposal facilities.

All such transfers occur under the stringent regulations of the international Basel Convention, with special rules applying to transfers within the OECD/

NEA [5].

5. FROM BILATERAL TO INTERNATIONAL MONITORING