Regulatory independence key topic as safety convention parties meet

With the recent demotion of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's Linda Keen from president to commissioner fresh in their minds, parties to the international Convention on Nuclear Safety, CNS, agreed the week ended April 25 that "further discussion" is required internationally on regulatory independence and the need to balance nuclear safety against the need to maintain production of essential goods and services.

In a summary report issued after the conclusion of their triennial peer review meeting April 25 in Vienna, CNS parties said continued attention was required to the "question of resolving potential conflict between nuclear safety and the need for production of goods and services which are essential for public safety or well-being," be they radioisotopes or electricity.

CNS review meeting Chairman Maurice Magugumela said in an interview the same day that the two-week review had seen "extensive discussion" of that issue, as well as of the question of what is meant by regulatory independence.

He said the parties had not come to a conclusion and that "the next [CNS review] meeting is going to continue discussing" both issues.

That meeting is scheduled for 2011, as stipulated in the convention, which was concluded in 1994 and entered into force in 1996.

Keen was fired as CNSC president January 15 by Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn after escalation of a dispute over whether the CNSC had acted appropriately in insisting late last year that Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. make promised retrofits to its 50-year-old NRU reactor before restarting it (NW, 17 Jan., 1; Inside NRC, 24 Jan., 1).

After the extended outage led to a shortage of medical isotopes, Parliament passed emergency legislation in early December to bypass the regulator and restart the NRU to produce fresh isotopes for a 120-day period.

The CNS review meeting spent considerable time discussing the ramifications of the Keen firing and the overturning by politicians of the CNSC's technical judgment on the NRU case, according to delegates who attended the closed discussions (INRC, 28 April, 9).

They called the decisions troubling because of Canada's status as a "leading nuclear country" and the threat that if politicians can interfere in the regulatory process in Canada, the same could happen anywhere.

Magugumela said an extensive discussion had also taken place during the CNS review about the meaning of regulatory independence.

The 1994 convention requires each contracting party to ensure "effective separation" between its nuclear regulatory authority and entities responsible for promoting nuclear power.

That is not the same thing as independence of a regulatory body; although "there is definitely a link" between the two notions, Magugumela said, "'independence' is a bit stronger."

He said "some contracting parties would like to go further" with requirements for independence under the CNS.

Several CNS parties came under the spotlight at the review meeting because their regulatory bodies were considered to be too close to promotional bodies, participants said, citing India and Brazil.

India's chief nuclear regulator, S.K. Sharma, said India does comply with the CNS requirements because the Atomic Energy Commission, to which his organization, the Atomic Energy Review Board, reports, is not promotional but rather sets policy.

Magugumela acknowledged that South Africa's National Nuclear Regulator, of which he is the CEO, does report to parliament through the Department of Minerals and Energy, which promotes nuclear energy.

"You have to report to parliament through a ministry" in a political system such as South Africa's, he said, but "we achieve independence in many ways," including having an independent board of directors that represents all stakeholders.

He said that NNR's decisions are made independently, with no input from DME.

"The convention is 20 years old," Magugumela said, "and many feel we need to look again" at some provisions, such as the "independence" issue.

Continuity

The CNS review participants also agreed on changes to the review process itself to ensure greater continuity between review meetings, Magugumela said.

The South African regulator had identified the issue of continuity as a priority for this review meeting (NW, 17 April, 9), after failure of an attempt made by Keen, who chaired the 2005 CNS review, to put in place a mechanism for communication among CNS parties between reviews.

Magugumela said parties last week adopted recommendations for improving the continuity and the efficiency of future review meetings.

This involves moving the date of the preparatory meeting for the next CNS from six months before the review meeting to 18 months before, in September 2009, and having the officers of the 2008 review meeting meet with those elected for the 2011 meeting at that time.

This, he said, will allow "sufficient preparation" and a "proper handover to the new officers."

Officers include the president, two vice presidents, and the heads and rapporteurs for "country groups" that discuss national reports during a review meeting. At this month's meeting, there were six country groups with 10 members each.

The country groups are composed in advance so that each reflects the diversity of the CNS membership, i.e., with big nuclear power countries, small ones, and countries without nuclear power.

Transparency

The open-ended working group also proposed some modifications to make the review process more transparent, delegates said.

The group proposed to open the first and last plenary sessions of the 2011 review to the media, they said.

Those sessions are very general; there was little support for letting the public attend any of the so-called country groups, where national nuclear safety reports are discussed among peers.

Andre-Claude Lacoste, chairman of France's Nuclear Safety Authority, said in an interview that as a first step, individual countries could offer to open the presentations of their national reports to the public. "France is ready to open" the presentation of its national report, he said.

But other regulators present in Vienna said they didn't see the point in doing that - since many national reports are already available on national web sites or via the IAEA CNS site - if media couldn't also listen to the question-and-answer sessions after the national reports, which would be closed.

Magugumela said that the "modalities" of opening parts of future review meetings to the media were "not yet ironed out" and would be dealt with by the planned "continuity mechanism."

Although many delegates privately expressed little enthusiasm for going back to national parliaments to seek amendments to the convention, some said that minor changes could be made without having to do that.

One of the officers for this year's review meeting said that an extraordinary meeting would be held this September at which all the proposals made by the fourth review meeting's "open-ended working group" would be submitted for adoption.

Subsequently, he said, the IAEA, which acts as the convention's secretariat, would prepare a "legal basis" for implementation of the proposals.

These would include changes to some of the rules of procedures, financial rules, and instructions for preparing national reports, he said.

The September 2009 meeting can then translate the changes into preparation for the 2011 review meeting, he said.

Safety

At the opening of this month's review meeting, Magugumela had said he hoped the delegates would address the issue of nuclear safety in emerging countries.

On April 25, he said the meeting had underlined the need for "new nuclear countries to have the necessary infrastructure established well before any construction authorization can be issued" for a new nuclear power plant."

The same concern was voiced by members of the International Nuclear Regulators Association, whose chairman, Dale Klein of the US, wrote to IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei April 25 to ask him to help get that message across to so-called emerging nuclear countries (see story, page 11).

The CNS now has 61 parties, 55 of which attended the fourth review meeting. Bangladesh, Kuwait, Mali, Republic of Moldova, Sri Lanka and Uruguay did not attend.

Magugumela said the review meeting had "resolved to have an outreach program to encourage those countries who are not yet members to see the benefits and to become members."

During the review meeting, a delegate from Nigera said the peer review was useful as "a learning experience" for his country.

Nigeria attended the review but did not submit a national report, according to the final summary report.

Other issues addressed by the fourth review meeting, according to the summary report, were those of "staffing and competence" - which CNS parties said was "a significant challenge ... that will require substantial effort to address," use of probabilistic safety assessment and periodic safety reviews, aging management, emergency management and new nuclear plant construction.

The delegates said that for PSA to be useful, "there must be a common understanding between operators and regulators on its application," but noted that "risk-informed decision-making is now a common practice in many contracting parties with nuclear power plants, and many are adopting a performance-based regulatory approach."

As for aging management and life extension, the delegates underlined the "importance of technical cooperation for availability of safety-related equipment and services."

The summary report is on the IAEA web site at http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2008/nuclearConvention.html (click on "summary report").

Created: May 2, 2008

Return to top

The full article can be read in Nucleonics Week , which is the leading source of global news for the commercial nuclear power business. Nucleonics Week delivers analysis with a depth and sophistication simply unavailable anywhere else. Find out who's building nuclear plants, and who's shutting them down. Learn which plants are performing best, and why they're succeeding. Take a trial or start a subscription today.