QA represents a management control system that the nuclear industry can use to establish and attain safety objectives for nuclear installations, as it produces measures of confidence in their achievement. It must be noted that assurance of quality is a corporate management goal and not the responsibility of a par­ticular QA function or QA group.

QA is a technique of good management that has been implicitly recognised for many years, especially in nuclear power stations, in responding to the sta­tutory requirements of the nuclear site licence. How­ever, the particular emphasis that quality assurance has brought is to make good management explicit in documentation and records that can be examined and assessed. The application of quality assurance to the whole life-cycle of nuclear power stations will involve analysis of arrangements, existing or proposed, to ensure that they provide adequate confidence and that their effective implementation can be verified objectively.