(What is the IAEA Safety Standards?) What is the IAEA? (Vol. 3)

Hello, everyone. My name is Daichi, an expert providing the information about the radiation issues in an easy-to-understand manner.

In this article, history of the IAEA toward its establishment, and in this article, overview of organization of the IAEA as well as its activities, are mainly, and briefly covered.

This article would come into a bit more detailed, with regard to the IAEA’s activities.

However, IAEA’s activities range a variety of fields and all of them can’t be covered, so the activities, which are deeply relevant to this blog, such as environmental restoration projects after the accident of nuclear power plants, will be focused on.

Among the activities, this article will elaborate a group of documents ‘IAEA Safety Standards’: the procedures for its creation, as well as approches of the Member States for its application.

In other words, this article will cover the following questions:

– What is the IAEA Safety Standards?
– How is the IAEA Safety Standards created?
– How is the IAEA Safety Standards use?

Table of contents of this article

I have been involved with the radiation-relevant issues, like the policy on the decontamination activities and the management of the Interim Storage Facility, after the accident of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

I received a doctorate in the field of radiation, while working in Fukushima.

(What is the IAEA Safety Standards?) What is the IAEA? (Vol. 3)

First, the IAEA Safety Standards are briefly covered, followed by detailed explanation of 3 kinds of documents, which consist of the IAEA Safety Standards.

What is the IAEA Safety Standards?

The IAEA Safety Standards is created based on the IAEA Statute, which was covered in this article, and it is a set of documents, aiming at protecting people and environment from harmful effects of ionizing radiation.

Specifically, they are comprised by ‘the Safety Fundamentals’, ‘the Safety Requirements’ and ‘the Safety Guides’, and they will be elaborated in the following sections.

Safety Fundamentals

The Fundamental Safety Principles is a document, which describes the most basic approach for radiation protection for people and environment, including objectives, concepts and principles of safety.

In the Safety Fundamentals, the following 10 principles are represented, which lay the basis for the Safety Requirements which will be covered next.

Principle 1: Responsibility for safety
Principle 2: Role of government
Principle 3: Leadership and management for safety
Principle 4: Justification of facilities and activities
Principle 5: Optimization of protection
Principle 6: Limitation of risks to individuals
Principle 7: Protection of present and future generations
Principle 8: Prevention of accidents
Principle 9: Emergency preparedness and response
Principle 10: Protective actions to reduce existing or unregulated radiation risks

Safety Requirements

The Safety Requirements is a set of documents, representing requirements to be met to secure safety, based on the aforementioned Safety Fundamentals, and basically the auxiliary verb ‘shall’, which shows strong obligatory implication to require somebody to do something, is used in many parts of the documents.

Unlike the aforementioned Safety Fundamentals, at this point of time, it consists of 7 General Safety Requirements and 6 Specific Safety Requirements.

With regard to the radiation protection, key points are covered in the General Safety Requirements Part3:’Radiation Protection and Safety of Radiation Sources: International Basic Safety Standards'(2014).

Safety Guides

The Safety Guides is a set of documents representing measures, conditions and procedures to comply with the aforementioned Safety Requirements, and basically the auxiliary verb ‘should’, which shows strong recommendation for something to be done, is used in many parts of the documents.

As is the case with the aforementioned Safety Requirements, it consists of the ‘General’ Safety Guides, and the ‘Specific’ Safety Guides, but the number of the Safety Guides always changes, because the Guides are sometimes newly established and also reviewed.

The number of the Safety Guides is so large, compared with the Safety Requirements, and it consists of around 25 General Safety Guides, and around 100 Specific Safety Guides.

There are a lot of Safety Guides, relevant to the radiation protection and environment restoration, which are covered in this blog.

For example, the General Safety Guides 15: General Safety Guides 15:’Remediation Strategy and Process for Areas Affected by Past Activities or Events'(2022) is related with off-site remediation.

How is the IAEA Safety Standards created?

As above-mentioned, the IAEA Safety Standards consist of 3 layers: the Safety Fundamentals, the Safety Requirements and the Safety Guides, but what kind of procedures do they go through for their creation?

For the creation of the IAEA Safety Standards, under the Board of Governors, which is made up of the Board Members, as well as the Director General, there is the Commission on Safety Standards, which consists of representatives from member states, and under the Commission, there are 5 following Standards Committees to discuss issue relevant to its specialized field.

– The Nuclear Safety Standards Committee
– The Waste Safety Standards Committee
– The Radiation Safety Standards Committee
– The Transport Safety Standards Committee
– The Emergency Preparedness and Response Standards Committee

And in each committee, sometimes a couple of meetings with small number of experts are organized, or sometimes a large meeting with the member states is held, to compile their opinions, followed by formulating a document.

Due to the Corona pandemic, these days big progresses can be seen in online meetings, but anyway 14 determined steps need to be followed, so usually it takes at least a couple of years, to create a document.

How is the IAEA Safety Standards used?

As previously explained in this article, the IAEA develops the IAEA Safety Standards, based on the reports of the UNSCEAR and the recommendations of the ICRP, but unlike the agreements based on the treaties, the Safety Standards has neither legal binding nor compelling force on countries.

But due to its long history and its abundant achievements, and also it is developed by taking a variety of opinions of the member states into account, it actually makes a great impact on legislative systems, and institutional arrangements of each country.

Summary

As a subsequent article from the previous, the IAEA Safety Standards is elaborated, as an example of measures of the IAEA’s detailed activities, to address contamination caused by radioactive materials, which is mainly covered in this blog.

Next time other IAEA’s activities in this field as well as their future direction will be elaborated.

By the way, above-mentioned contents are summarized in the following videos.

It would be appreciated to visit them at your convenience.

– Japanese version

– English version

You can read the same article in Japanese here.

Thank you very much for reading this article.

See you next time!