Binding safety standards for nuclear regime needed, experts tell IAEA

As the world debates the future of nuclear power plants in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster in Japan, experts have called for inclusion of binding safety standards in the international nuclear regime.

A group of 15 nuclear experts, including Anil Kakodkar, former chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, have made the suggestion to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In a letter to IAEA, the experts have recommended that safety standards be made part of discussions at a ministerial conference scheduled for June at Vienna. Stating that the March 11 earthquake in Japan shows nuclear power plants are capable of withstanding some natural catastrophes better than other man-made ones, the experts aaid the site and design of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plants did not take into account low probability events like loss of power due to an earthquake and tsunami.

The experts have also recommended that requirements of new countries wishing to start using nuclear power should be developed and incorporated into the international nuclear safety regime. Countries like India and China, for instance, were looking to expand their nuclear powergeneration capacity. “Such countries must demonstrate their ability to uphold high international standards with regard to safety, security and non-proliferation over the lifetime of their nuclear powerprogrammes.

In putting in place a new safety regime, the options could include performing compulsory inspections or further developing and strengthening existing frameworks through emphasis on national responsibilities in combination with rigorous international peer reviews.“It is to be expected that the international conference to be convened at the IAEA in Vienna this June will provide a starting point for discussions of such measures,” said the statement, sent to Yukiya Amano, director general of IAEA.

The experts have observed that combinations of initiating events, unforeseen in plant designs, resulted in all the severe nuclear accidents on record. This is so of the Three Mile Island episode in the United States in 1979, Chernobyl in the former USSR in 1986 or the recent one in Japan.

The accidents took emergency responders outside the range of circumstances for which they were trained and equipped. “Moreover, hindsight shows that relatively inexpensive improvements, detectable by more extensive analysis beforehand, may have avoided these accidents altogether,” said the statement.