Safety Requirements (SR)

 

OBJECTIVE

The objective of the Technical Safety Review of Safety Requirements (TSR-SR) is to assist Member States represented by the Requesting Party in the process of developing or revising national safety requirements for facilities and activities. National documents of different levels (typically regulations and guides) for ​various nuclear facilities and activities may be reviewed. 

The TSR-SR helps the Member State to develop national documents in line with sound international practices reflected in the IAEA Safety Standards. The outcome of the review provides specific comments and recommendations to improve consistency of the national requirements with the IAEA Safety Standards.

​SCOPE OF THE REVIEW

The service has been developed to cover broad range of national regulations and guides for different lifetime stages (siting, design, construction, commissioning, operation and decommissioning) of the authorized facilities (typically nuclear power plants or fuel cycle facilities) and authorized activities (use of radioactive sources, radioactive waste management, transport of radioactive materials). The documentation to be provided to by the Requesting Party to the international experts should typically contain:

• The national safety requirements (regulations and/or guides) to be reviewed.
• Description of existing and planned national regulatory framework as applicable for the authorized facilities and activities, including description of the process for adopting new national safety requirements.
• Intended role of the safety requirements submitted for the IAEA review in the overall national regulatory framework, and envisaged time frame for the adoption of the requirements.
• Specification of the interfaces of the submitted documents with existing or planned interrelated legal documents, including documents of the higher legal level (laws), the same level (regulations) or lower level (guides), as applicable.
• Specification of the terminology to be used in the national safety requirements; if the Requesting Party decides to use terminology different from the IAEA Safety Standards, a relevant document with applicable definitions should be made available to reviewers.

The review is focused on evaluation of the comprehensiveness, correctness and clarity of the technical content of the national regulations and guides. Although description of the process of development and application of the national regulatory framework provides relevant complementary information for evaluation the quality of national documents, such process is not the subject of the independent review.

The IAEA review is performed using references to specific requirements given in the relevant IAEA Safety Requirements for different lifetime stages of the authorized facilities and different authorized activities. In selected cases, IAEA Safety Guides may be used by the reviewers as sources of complementary supporting information. Selection of the relevant IAEA Safety Standards as reference documents for the review is made correspondingly to the subject and the scope of the reviewed national documents and should be specified in the terms of reference for the IAEA review. 

Examples of areas where observations from the review are typically identified are as follows:

• Specification of terminology and its consistent use throughout the regulations or guides;
• Structure of the regulations or guides;
• Comprehensiveness with regard to the IAEA Safety Standards;
• Consistency with the IAEA Safety Standards when they are used verbatim;
• Internal consistency of the regulations or guides;
• Technical correctness of the requirements;
• Clear and unambiguous formulation of requirements;
• Balance of the volume of information in different requirements;
• Adequate level of detail corresponding to the level of a document;
• Validity, consistency and position of the references in the text. 

BENE​F​ITS

The TSR-SR offers interested Member States a number of benefits including:

• ​Ensures compliance and/or identifies differences of national safety requirements as compared to the IAEA Safety Standards;
• Obtains independent view on comprehensiveness, correctness and feasibility of application of national safety requirements correspondingly to the national nuclear programme.
  
• Identifies interfaces with other applicable regulatory documents to ensure completeness of coverage and avoiding unnecessary overlapping.
  
• Ensures the clarity, consistency and balancing the content of national safety requirements considering cross-referencing with other legal instruments covered by the review.
  
• Shares experiences with international experts in the area of development and application of national and IAEA safety requirements;
• Establishes proper balance between prescriptive and performance-based approach in national safety requirements correspondingly to the international experience.
  
• Establishes personal contacts and broadening possibilities for international cooperation in the area of nuclear legislation.
  
• Demonstrates openness and transparency in establishing country’s regulatory framework.
  
• Increases confidence of public and international nuclear community that the national safety requirements follow international best practices.
  

SAFETY REQUIREMENTS (SR) reviews conducted