Among the international intergovernmental organizations involved in radi­ation safety, the IAEA is the only one specifically authorized under the terms of its Statute to establish radiation safety standards. Unsurprisingly the first endeavour to establish international radiation protection require­ments was made at the IAEA, and has become the main international radiation safety requirement for all activities involving radiation exposure, including NPPs. Over time it has come to be known as ‘basic safety stan­dards’, or BSS.

The IAEA’s Board of Governors first approved radiation protection and safety ‘measures’ in March 1960 (IAEA, 1960, 1976), when it was stated that ‘the IAEA’s basic safety standards. . . will be based, to the extent possible, on the recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP).’ The IAEA’s Board of Governors first approved basic safety standards in June 1962, and these were published as Safety Series No. 9 (IAEA, 1962), a revised version being published in 1967 (IAEA, 1967). At the beginning of the 1980s a further — comprehensive — revision was carried out. This was jointly sponsored by the IAEA and two other organizations of the UN family, ILO and WHO, and also by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD/NEA). The resulting text was published by the IAEA as the 1982 edition of Safety Series No. 9 (IAEA, 1982). At the end of the 1980s, the ICRP revised its standing advice and issued its 1990 recom­mendations (ICRP, 1991) in the light of which relevant organizations of the UN family and other multinational agencies promptly started to review their own radiation safety standards. Thus, taking account of the new devel­opments, the IAEA, FAO, ILO, OECD/NEA, PAHO and WHO established a Joint Secretariat for the preparation of new International Basic Safety Standards for Protection Against Ionizing Radiation and for the Safety of Radiation Sources, which came to be commonly referred to as the Basic Safety Standards (or BSS) (IAEA, 1996a; Gonzalez, 1994, 2001a). At the moment of preparation of this book the BSS are freshly revised (IAEA, 2011) to take account of the new ICRP recommendations (ICRP, 2007a).

For the particular case of NPPs, the BSS are supported by requirements on safe siting (IAEA, 2003a), design (IAEA, 2000c) and operation (IAEA, 2000d), which, mutatis mutandi, include radiation protection requirements. They are also sustained by a plethora of safety guides, including those on radiation protection aspects of design for nuclear power plants (IAEA, 2005c), on radiation protection and radioactive waste management in the operation of nuclear power plants (IAEA, 2002a) and on dispersion of radioactive material in air and water and consideration of population dis­tribution in site evaluation (IAEA, 2002b).