As required by its Statute (IAEA, 1957), the IAEA began to issue ‘standards of safety for protection of health and minimization of danger to life and property. . .

and to provide for the application of these standards to its own operations. . soon after its inception. While the standards are obligatory for its own operations, they are non-binding recommendations for IAEA member states. Eventually, standards were developed to cover all of the areas of safety related to the use of ionizing radiations; they included the safety of nuclear installations, radiation protection in all applications of radioactive materials, including transport, medicine, industry and research, and radioactive waste management. They were created by groups of experts drawn from the member states of the IAEA and were intended to reflect international good practice. However, in the early days, they were not necessarily used as the main source for the drafting of national regulations. One exception was the IAEA Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Material. Because shipments of radioactive material regularly crossed national boundaries there was an obvious need for a common international regulatory approach. The first IAEA transport regulations were issued in 1961 and they have been developed and refined in successive editions up to the present time (IAEA, 2009a). All national regulations dealing with safety in the transport of radioactive material are based on the IAEA transport regulations.

In the period up to the mid-1980s other areas were considered to be in need of international regulation. One example was the disposal of radioactive waste at sea. Until the 1980s, ‘sea dumping’ was a common method for radioactive waste disposal, but as concerns about the practice increased, there was pressure for some form of regulation. The London Dumping Convention (now the London Convention 1972) requested guidance from the IAEA on how radioactive waste disposal at sea could be conducted safely (IMO, 1972). A number of IAEA safety standards and guides were issued in the 1970s and 1980s prescribing an approved approach and setting limits on dumping amounts. (In 1993, the practice of dumping radioactive waste at sea was forbidden by the Contracting Parties to the London Convention.) Another area in which the IAEA’s guidance was sought was in relation to the control of discharges to the atmosphere and to the aquatic environment and, at the request of IAEA member states, in the 1970s and 1980s a number of safety standards reflecting accepted international policy in this area were issued.

It is clear that, up to this time, governments considered that it was only practices that had obvious international implications that required international regulation. For most applications of nuclear energy, they were content to develop their own regulatory approaches although, inevitably, there was a high degree of commonality. In particular, the policies and regulations adopted for radiation protection were universally based on the recommendations of the ICRP and the IAEA’s Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Ionizing Radiation.