These requirements are concerned with ensuring that there are proper preparedness and response arrangements in place to manage a nuclear or radiological emergency.

• Emergency management system — The government shall ensure that an integrated and coordinated emergency management system is established and maintained.

• Preparedness and response to an emergency — The government shall ensure that protection strategies are developed, justified and optimized at the planning stage, and that emergency response is undertaken through their timely implementation.

• Arrangements for controlling the exposure of emergency workers — The government shall establish a programme for managing, controlling and recording the doses received in an emergency by emergency workers.

• Transition stage — The government shall ensure that arrangements are in place and are implemented as appropriate for the transition from an emergency exposure situation to an existing exposure situation.

The dose limits suggested by the ICRP are intended to be applied to the protection of individuals from all regulated sources of radiation. For the purposes of optimizing protection for individual sources of radiation, dose constraints and reference levels are applied. The increased emphasis on dose constraints and reference levels in the new ICRP recommendations probably represents the most significant change as compared with the previous recommendations (Wrixon, 2008).

Dose constraints are applied to occupational and public exposure in planned exposure situations. Dose constraints are set separately for each controlled source and serve as a boundary in defining the range of options for optimization. While the objectives of the use of dose constraints for controlling occupational and public exposure are similar, they are applied in different ways. For occupational exposure, the dose constraint is a tool to be established and used by the person or organization responsible for any facility or activity in the optimization of protection and safety. For public exposure in planned exposure situations, the government or regulatory body establishes or approves dose constraints, taking into account the characteristics of the site and the facility, the exposure scenarios and the views of interested parties. After the exposures have occurred, the dose constraint may be used as a benchmark when assessing the suitability of the optimized protection strategy that has been implemented and for making adjustments as judged necessary.

Reference levels are used for optimization in emergency exposure situations and existing exposure situations. These are established or approved by the government, regulatory body or other relevant authority. For occupational and public exposure in emergency exposure situations, a reference level serves as the boundary in defining the range of options in optimization for implementing protection actions. The reference level represents the level of dose or risk above which it is judged to be inappropriate to plan to allow exposures to occur, and below which optimization of protection is implemented. Once an emergency exposure situation has occurred, actual exposures may be above or below the reference level, which would then be used as a benchmark to judge whether further protective measures are necessary and to assist in prioritizing their application.

The ICRP recommends a range of doses spanning two orders of magnitude within which the value of a dose constraint or reference level usually should be chosen. At the lower end of this range, the dose constraint or reference level represents an increase, up to about 1 mSv, above the dose received in a year from natural background radiation (the worldwide annual average radiation dose from radiation sources of natural origin, including radon, is 2.4 mSv (UNSCEAR, 2000)) and should be used when individuals are exposed to a source that gives them little or no individual benefit, but for which there may be benefits to society in general. This is the case, for instance, when establishing dose constraints for public exposure in planned exposure situations. Dose constraints or reference levels of 1-20 mSv should be used when individuals usually receive benefit from the exposure situation, but not necessarily from the exposure itself. This is the case, for instance, when establishing dose constraints for occupational exposure in planned exposure situations. Reference levels of 20-100 mSv should be used when individuals are exposed to sources that are not under control or where actions to reduce doses would be disproportionately disruptive. This is the case, for instance, when establishing reference levels for the residual dose from a radiological emergency. Any situation resulting in a dose above 100 mSv incurred acutely or in a year should be considered unacceptable except under circumstances addressed specifically to the exposure of emergency workers (ICRP, 2007).

A large number of services by international teams is available, in engineering and operating safety as well as in the transportation and waste safety fields. One of the best known is the work of the Operational Safety Review Team (OSART), created in 1982. International teams of experts conduct in-depth reviews of operational safety performance at a nuclear power plant. They review safety management and personnel performance. In addition, reviews provide opportunities to disseminate information on good practices that come to light during missions. In broad terms the programme covers the following operational areas: management, organization and administration; training and qualifications; operations; maintenance; technical support; operating experience and feedback; radiation protection; chemistry; and emergency planning and preparedness. A recent enhancement of the review is the addition of a dedicated expert to review the area of operating experience. A long list of good practices resulting from OSART missions is available from the IAEA (IAEA, 2006/2).

A global overview of nuclear safety issues is available from the IAEA in the annually published Nuclear Safety Review, the most recent one in 2009 (IAEA, 2010/5).

Plutonium production reactors in the UK, France and Russia were, like those at Hanford, based on metallic natural uranium with a graphite moderator. As at Hanford the Russian reactor (at Chelyabinsk) was water cooled but in the UK (Windscale) and in France (Marcoule) the reactors were gas cooled and later formed the basis of the first generation of electricity-producing reactors in these two countries. Only the British went on to develop these into a more advanced gas-cooled commercial type although there were many experimental designs along the way, including high temperature reactors. France gave up gas-cooled designs in favour of light water reactors in the late 1960s. In the UK this did not happen until almost two decades later.

A year after the war had ended, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was established (August 1946) to control nuclear energy development and foster its peaceful use. Within the AEC programme under the direction of Rear-Admiral Hyman Rickover, ANL in collaboration with Westinghouse developed a reactor for use as a submarine propulsion unit.2 The use of plutonium or highly enriched uranium fuel coupled with a pressurised water coolant allowed the requisite power to be generated from a reactor that was sufficiently small to fit inside the ship’s hull. The keel for USS Nautilus the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine was laid in June 1952 and the ship was launched January 1954. The reactor design was subsequently scaled up for a land-based pressurised water reactor (PWR) and a prototype was constructed at Shippingport, Pennsylvania (230 MW thermal, 60 MW electrical); this went critical in December 1957. This was a joint venture between AEC, Westinghouse (vendor) and Duquense Light Company (utility).

A series of five boiling water reactor experiments (known as BORAX I to V) were designed by ANL and tested at AEC’s Idaho National Reactor Testing Station starting in 1953 and running through to 1964.3 The third experiment (mid-1955) produced enough electricity to power the nearby town of Arco. The first commercial plant (5 MW(e)) was built in 1957 at Vallecitos near San Jose, California. Based on this work, General Electric constructed a 210 MW(e) BWR for Commonwealth Edison at Dresden, Illinois, which started operation in October 1959. It was notable for being the first US reactor to be built without government funding.

Canada has developed, operated and exported its own unique pressurised heavy water reactor (PHWR) design, known as CANDU (see Chapter 11). The original aim was to exploit the country’s large reserves of uranium and to avoid the complications, expense and proliferation risks that are inherent in enrichment and reprocessing. The resulting design maximises neutron economy through the use of a heavy water coolant cum moderator. With non-enriched fuel, maximum burn-up is around 8 GWd/tHM (significantly less than with enriched fuel) but the reactor can be operated with a range of fuel cycles and twelve have been sold and are in operation throughout the world. Two units were sold to India the first of which went into service in 1973 but support from Canada was withdrawn after the testing of India’s nuclear bomb in May 1974. Cooperation effectively began again in 2008 when, with the consent of the IAEA, India reached an agreement with the Nuclear Suppliers Group4 but, in the interim, India had developed its own PHWR variants and investigated their use with thorium fuel.

A particular attraction of the PHWR is the use of pressure tubes to avoid the need for a large, difficult to construct pressure vessel. Similar considerations drove the development of the Soviet RBMK (reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny, high-power channel reactor) design which, like the early gas-cooled reactors, was based on a military plutonium-producing reactor. The fuel was low enrichment uranium oxide held within sealed Zircaloy tubes. These were placed inside vertical pressure tubes through which flowed pressurised water. The pressure tubes, each about 7 metres long, were located in penetrations through a graphite moderator block.5 A 5 MW prototype produced electricity from 1954 to 1959 at Obninsk, though it continued as a research facility until 2000.6 Later designs, constructed in Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, were much larger.

A general aim in the management of radioactive waste is to reduce the associated risks to as low as practicable by appropriate processing, containment and eventual disposal. Firstly, however, the amount of waste should be minimized, that is, avoided to the extent possible. It may be achieved through the optimization of nuclear facility design, including the appropriate choice of materials, the application of good operational practices and the recycling and reuse of materials.

The amount of material which requires treatment as a waste may also be reduced if the parts which are sufficiently low in activity concentration to satisfy the regulatory requirements for clearance can be identified. These materials may be separated and treated as non-radioactive materials, that is, reused, recycled or disposed of as normal waste. Further reduction in the amount of waste to be treated can be achieved by segregating waste containing only very short-lived radionuclides from other waste types. This waste can be stored to allow decay to below levels that allow clearance from control. Finally, the volumes of radioactive waste that need treatment may be reduced by processing to decrease the space they occupy by mechanical (compacting, shredding) or thermal (incineration, vitrification) methods.

The generally preferred approach for the management of radioactive waste is to concentrate the waste and to contain the radionuclides in it by means of the waste matrix and a waste container followed by disposal in an appropriate disposal facility designed to provide isolation from the biosphere. For radioactive waste in liquid and gaseous forms, however, it may be appropriate to release them to the environment provided that their concentrations are sufficiently low to satisfy the requirements set by the national regulatory body. Otherwise, they must also be concentrated and contained after appropriate processing and managed as solid waste.

Policies and strategies for managing spent fuel and the various types of radioactive waste are discussed in IAEA (2009b). Decisions on the fate of different types of radioactive waste are essentially based on radiation protection considerations; they imply that radioactive waste management solutions should:

provide protection from external radiation by shielding,

contain and isolate radioactive material from the human environment, and

prevent inadvertent human ingress to the radioactive material.

In the following paragraphs the technical options for ensuring that these criteria are met for the different types of radioactive waste are set out with reference to the IAEA waste classification scheme (IAEA, 2009c).

For each step in the nuclear fuel cycle, from uranium mining to waste treatment and disposal, specific issues of public acceptability can be identified and addressed. A primary point that has to be made is the simple fact that nuclear technology is already developed and deployed, and that nuclear waste already exists and will continue to do so into the far future. Therefore, issues of acceptability with regard to the nuclear fuel cycle typically arise when operations are reviewed (e. g. for renewal of an operational or environmental licence), activities are expanded or new activities are planned, or, as we saw before, when safety related incidents or accidents occur.

We will not make a detailed distinction here between the different technical steps in the nuclear fuel cycle, but keep to the three main components: the front end, service period and back end, and focus on how issues of public acceptability are being addressed today.

California’s economy is so large that, if it were an independent country, it would rank in the top ten in the world. Electricity generation (200938) is primarily by natural gas (39%) followed by imports from other states (31%) then nuclear (10%), renewables (10%) and large hydro (8%). Currently, there are two NPPs in operation; these started up in 1983 and 1986. There are also five reactors that are no longer in operation, one experimental and four commercial. The state has a strong environmental lobby — it is home to the Sierra Club, which claims to be ‘America’s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization’39 — and, if proof of anti-nuclear feeling were needed, one of the commercial NPPs was closed in 1989 by public referendum.40

There is a 1976 State law that prohibits the building of new NPPs until the waste issue is solved and another of 200641 that requires the state to reduce GHG emissions by 80% by 2050 ‘while accommodating projected growth in its economy and population’ (the latter is expected to increase by almost 50%). A two year study was established to see how this might be achieved and the resulting report42 stresses the need for diversity — ‘a suite of generation technologies’ — including nuclear power, renewables, fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biomass which, if combined with CCS, can provide an important pathway for creating negative emissions. It concludes that emissions reductions of about 60% could be reached by 2050 provided that all the following currently available technologies were implemented:

Aggressive efficiency measures for buildings, industry and transportation to dramatically reduce per capita energy demand.

Aggressive electrification to avoid fossil fuel use where technically feasible. Decarbonize electricity supply while doubling electricity production, and develop zero-emissions load balancing approaches to manage load variability and minimize the impact of variable supply for renewables like wind and solar. Decarbonize the remaining required fuel supply where electrification is not feasible.

Decarbonisation of electricity supply includes use of renewables but, in effect, warns against the use of natural gas (unless combined with CCS) to balance the load when the renewables are running at less than required capacity. The objective of the statute — 80% reductions by 2050 — cannot be achieved with existing technology but may be feasible given intensive and sustained investment and innovation.

Fukushima occurred as this study was nearing publication causing the authors to say that time would be needed to learn the lessons of the accident but that ‘what is clear even now is that this event will have a major impact on the way we think about nuclear power and will be a factor in considering the future of nuclear power in California’. Two months after the study was published, the California Council on Science and Technology issued a follow-up43 that called for the installation of 44 GW of new nuclear capacity — a tenfold increase on the present day. Regarding Fukushima the key message is that lessons should be ‘factored into decisions about the potential future use of nuclear reactor technologies in California’.

D. SCHRIEFER, Consultant (formerly Director International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards), Austria

Abstract: The 3S concept, established in recent years, is a parcel of regulatory and protective measures applied to promote safety, security and safeguards in nuclear power generation. ‘Safety’ encompasses all technical and organizational measures taken during planning, design, construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear plants (as part of the nuclear fuel cycle) to protect people and the environment against risks. ‘Security’ indicates measures to protect people, facilities and material against unauthorized human interference. ‘Safeguards’ relate to the protection against misuse of nuclear facilities and the diversion of nuclear material from peaceful use. The measures that are taken in these different, but connected, fields have a number of common features. They require a similar ‘discipline and culture’ built on years of experience and there can be synergies in approaches, particularly in the regulatory area. This chapter provides an overview of the 3S concept, which is of particular relevance as a nuclear energy renaissance is anticipated.

Key words: international safeguards, nuclear conventions, nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear energy, nuclear liability, NPT, proliferation, safety, security.

3.1 Introduction

For future and further development energy is essential. The availability and access to energy is as important for developing economies as it is for the continued growth of industrialized regions. This has been acknowledged by the growing number of countries taking a fresh look at nuclear energy — some countries, again, some others for the first time. Either in the context of real, expected or perceived shortfalls of other energy sources, striving for greater independence from fossil fuels or desiring to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, now there maybe plans for a nuclear renaissance. The World Nuclear Association’s low estimate for 2030 indicates that, out of 32 countries with existing nuclear programmes, 28 are planning an expansion. In addition there are seven countries with currently no nuclear programmes plus states of the Gulf Cooperation Council with plans to go nuclear by 2030; the high estimate shows that 31 countries with existing nuclear power programmes may expand and more than 30 newcomers.

However, there are lessons to be learned from past experience: when embarking on a nuclear programme a country must become a member of a worldwide discipline dedicated to and solidly following a safe, secure and peaceful path.

‘Going nuclear is a 100-year commitment. A country should understand all the international obligations connected and also the internal consequence of going nuclear’ (Sokolov, 2010). This needs efforts by all national entities and authorities involved to ensure that the programme is supported by the best available technology during preparation, planning, building, operating, maintaining and decommissioning of the technology. It includes the safest designs and best operational standards, the provision of nuclear security, the physical protection of the nuclear installations and of all nuclear and radioactive materials involved. The international community requires transparency to show that nuclear facilities and material are only used for peaceful purposes. The safe, secure and safeguarded operation of a nuclear power plant must be carried on throughout its entire lifetime, and it requires legal and regulative support. The 3S concept of safety, security and safeguards encompasses all the measures relating to these issues.

Steps to provide nuclear safety have been discussed since the discovery of nuclear energy, particularly to protect people, both workers and the public, against dangerous radiation. For the same reason physical protection has played an essential role in the development and during the growth of the nuclear industry. Non-proliferation concerns were strongly expressed immediately after the horrific demonstration of the destructive power of non-peaceful nuclear devices and throughout the ensuing race for nuclear weapons.

More recently, the terrorist actions of 11 September 2001 in New York, and similar events later in the UK, Spain, Russia and elsewhere have generated additional concern for improved security. Even though none of these events involved nuclear technology, a new threat appeared: could a nuclear weapon be obtained by some terrorist group or could unauthorized removal of radioactive material lead to its use, with a malicious intent, for a radioactive dispersal device, a ‘dirty bomb’? How can nuclear or radioactive material be prevented from falling into the hands of criminal or terrorist groups and used to annihilate or contaminate large inhibited areas? Fear of such events has led nuclear security specialists to consider new threats and risks taking the scenarios beyond what was sufficient in the past. Nuclear security now aims to be better prepared to detect, prevent and respond to dangers raised by malicious intentions.

In July 2008, after the G8 Summit in Toyako, on Hokkaido in Japan, an official document, the ‘International Initiative on 3S-Based Nuclear Energy Infrastructure’, was produced; this document makes reference to the 3S concept as identified in the IAEA’s ‘Milestones in the Development of a National Infrastructure for Nuclear Power’ (IAEA, 2007). Since then, 3S has been used frequently to denote nuclear safeguards, safety and security.[1] This regime is designed to provide transparency and confidence for long-term support to current and future utilization of nuclear technology, including the expected renaissance of nuclear power.

Nuclear safety includes all technical and organizational measures taken during planning, design, construction, operation and decommissioning of nuclear plants (as part of the nuclear fuel cycle) to protect people and the environment against technical risks: radiation, incidents and accidents, emergencies during installation, processing, storage and transport involving nuclear and radioactive material or during the operation of facilities that use such material.

Nuclear security and its physical protection principles provide measures to protect people, facilities and material against human unauthorized interference, whether with malicious intent or not. Examples are negligence, theft, sabotage and terrorist acts.

Nuclear safeguards protect against misuse of nuclear facilities and the diversion of nuclear material from peaceful use. The application of safeguards is a consequence of a political choice of a state to be party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and forgo nuclear weapons. Once the country has become a party to the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state, it must negotiate a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. This will be a legally binding international instrument; it foresees detailed declarations by the country and inspections and access to the country’s nuclear material and related facilities by IAEA safeguards inspectors as part of the mandatory verification regime. There are no similar international arrangements in the other regulatory areas.

Optimization is aimed at achieving the best level of protection under the prevailing circumstances through an ongoing iterative process that involves:

• Evaluation of the exposure situation, including any potential exposures, that is, exposures not certain to occur but with a finite probability of occurring;

• Selection of an appropriate value for the constraint or reference level;

• Identification of the possible protection options;

• Selection of the best option under the prevailing circumstances; and

• Implementation of the selected option.

In all situations the process of optimization with the use of constraints or reference levels should be applied in planning protective actions and in establishing the appropriate level of protection (ICRP, 2006).

Dose limits

While the optimization of planned exposures from individual radiation sources is constrained by source related dose constraints, the overall dose to an individual must be kept within dose limits (ICRP, 2007).

For occupational exposure in planned exposure situations, the ICRP recommends that the limit should be an effective dose of 20 mSv per year, averaged over defined 5 year periods (100 mSv in 5 years) with the further provision that the effective dose should not exceed 50 mSv in any single year.

For public exposure in planned exposure situations, the ICRP recommends that the limit should be an effective dose of 1 mSv in a year. However, in special circumstances a higher value of effective dose could be allowed in a single year, provided that the average over the defined 5-year period does not exceed 1mSv per year.

The limits on effective dose apply to the sum of doses due to external exposures and committed doses from internal exposures due to intakes of radionuclides. In addition to the limits on effective dose, separate limits, defined in terms of annual equivalent dose, are set by the ICRP for the lens of the eye and localized areas of skin because these tissues will not necessarily be protected by the limit on effective dose.

Dose limits do not apply in emergency exposure situations where an informed, exposed individual is engaged in volunteered life-saving actions or is attempting to prevent a catastrophic situation. For informed volunteers undertaking urgent rescue operations, the normal dose restriction may be relaxed. However, later phases of recovery and restoration operations should be considered as normal exposure situations and the relevant limits applied.

Ever since the first commercial nuclear power reactors were built, there has been concern about the possible effects of a severe nuclear accident, coupled with the question of who would be liable. This concern was based on the supposition that, even with reactor designs considered safe, a cooling failure causing the core to melt would result in major consequences akin to those of the Chernobyl disaster. Experience over five decades has shown this fear to be exaggerated, so that the impact of a severe accident or terrorist attack is very likely to be localized and small. Following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the IAEA initiated work on all aspects of nuclear liability in an effort to improve the basic conventions and establish a comprehensive liability regime. Before 1997, the international liability regime was embodied primarily in two instruments: the OECD’s Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy of 1960 (NEA, 1960), in force since 1968 (bolstered by the Brussels Supplementary Convention of 1963) and the IAEA’s Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage of 1963, in force since 1977 (IAEA, 1963).

More recently, liability has become a much more relevant factor in the context of global nuclear safety and security. Nuclear liability is now channelled exclusively to the operator of the nuclear installation and the liability of the operator is absolute, i. e. the operator is held liable irrespective of where the fault originates. The potential cross-boundary consequences of a nuclear accident require an international nuclear liability regime, so national laws are supplemented by a number of international conventions. Liability is limited by both international conventions and by national legislation, so that beyond the limit (normally covered by insurance for third-party liability) the state can accept responsibility as insurer of last resort, as in all other aspects of industrial society. It is the government’s role to ascertain that the commitment to the international liability regimes is kept by its nuclear operators. Liability is limited in time (generally ten years after an accident, but national law may provide modifications) and amount (roughly now to a limit of US$ 300 million[7]). The operator is obliged to maintain insurance for an amount corresponding to its liability.