 I'm a standard specialist in the IAEA in the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security. And I've worked in the IAEA for about 12 years. I work on the content of the safety standards and also on the process that we use to develop them. So you should be able to ask me questions on many aspects of them. We have around 130 safety standards. They cover all sorts of topics from siting, seismic issues, quite technical things, as far as regulation, leadership, management. A lot of things about radiation protection, transport of radioactive materials. So a really very broad spectrum of topics. And we have a number of experts who prepare the content. But in the end of the day, the program is managed in a rather centralized way. And there has to be consistency. And the output has to be a single output rather than 130 different outputs. So that's why there are people like me in the agency who are dedicated to working with the safety standards, who are experts in the standards rather than in the particular topical areas. So the presentation is structured like this. First of all, I'm going to give you a brief overview about really what the IA safety standards are, what the context for them is, how regulation at an international level works. Then a brief history of the safety standards. And then on the third bullet point, moving on to today, what is the vision that we work to for the safety standards, what strategies we have in place, what the processes are that we use. I'm going to touch on a couple of recent developments, things that are happening at the moment or have recently happened that have been driving the program. And then begin to close by explaining how different states use the safety standards. And then the last couple of slides are just really websites where you can find further information and a little bit more direction to find out more about it if you want to. And as you did this morning with the presentations, please feel free to interrupt me. If you have any questions, I tend to talk rather fast sometimes. So I would try to slow down. I come from Ireland. So maybe I have an accent that you're not familiar with. And I also get quite enthusiastic about the safety standards. And I forget that not everybody knows everything that I know or is as interested as I am in them. So that sometimes means that I talk in a way you might not understand entirely what I'm talking about. So please interrupt and ask me to explain anything if you lose me. So to start with the overview. So the safety standards fit into something that we call the global nuclear safety and security framework. So at the top we have conventions, treaties, codes of conduct, there are a few abbreviations up there that I'll explain to you. On the left side there are conventions, the Convention on Nuclear Safety, that's the CNS. It covers basically most of the countries that have nuclear power plants and many others too have signed up to this. And they commit to reviewing their safety every three years and review meetings. The Joint Convention is a very similar convention. It has a larger number of contracting parties. It's called Joint Convention because it covers two things, spent fuel management and radioactive waste management, maybe it was touched on yesterday slightly. The CPPNM is the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. It covers what we call nuclear security in the IAEA. And United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 covers nonproliferation. So these are conventions and there are others as well, there are conventions relating to emergencies, to notification of accidents and so on that the IAEA has some role to play in either as a depository but basically they are treaties that states have signed up to and have committed to. So they are legal treaties. On the right-hand side there are codes of conduct, we have two codes of conduct. They cover research reactors and safety and security of radiation sources, two different publications. They are not legally binding in the way the conventions are but they are still legal instruments that states try to adhere to. And many of these, particularly the ones relating to safety rather than security or nonproliferation, they are what we call soft law or incentive law. So there's really just an incentive to do what you signed up to do. There's not going to be a punishment if you don't manage to do it. At the bottom then we have the application in the real world. We've got operation, we've got actual regulation by regulators, national regulators. So what's happening at a national level? And then in between we have what the IAEA does. So we've got the safety standards and security guidance on the left. Safety reviews and services that Peter's going to talk about later. And the global knowledge network. So that's the way that the IAEA assists states to interact with one another and to share knowledge about safety. So these three things are the day-to-day work of our Department of Nuclear Safety. And I would even, if I were to draw this diagram, I would put the safety standards in the middle of it. Because without the safety standards, the Department of Nuclear Safety and security in the IAEA has nothing to do. Everything that we do derives from the safety standards. All the safety review missions, all the assistance we give to states in relation to safety, all aims to assist states in meeting the IAEA safety standards. So that's where they fit in on a sort of global context. And the IAEA is entitled or obligated to establish safety standards. So the IAEA was established in 1957 and the statute was written at that time. And Article 3A6 refers specifically to safety standards as one of the core functions of the IAEA to establish or adopt standards of safety for protection of health and minimization of danger to life and property. That's to write the safety standards or to take them from somewhere else but to establish them, to put the IAEA's name to them. And then on their right to provide for the application. So to assist states in applying the safety standards. So we have to do it. It's part of our core functions. It's as important a function of the IAEA as being a nuclear weapons inspector. It's been going on for quite a while. So and then another thing I think you need to sort of think about as well before we start into how the safety standards work in detail. Is how they are important for you as a national regulator or as a national operator. The regulation of safety is a national responsibility. It's not the responsibility of the IAEA. Each country itself is responsible for regulating safety in its own country. And the prime responsibility for safety is with the operator. We had a slight discussion about this morning. And in fact that's principle one of the IAEA fundamental safety principles. That there's only one person can hold responsibility. If too many people have responsibility then nobody has responsibility. So the prime responsibility for safety is with the operator. But what do the IAEA safety standards do then? So they're not legally binding. So member states don't have to use them, but they can if they wish. They are binding for us, for anything that we do. If we are assisting states with providing some equipment, we have to make sure that the state will meet the safety standards before they can accept the equipment. And that more relates to, sorry, to the third bullet point. So in relation to our operations assisting states and for our own activity. So any work that we do with radioactive material, we have to meet our own safety standards in that respect. So although states do not have to use them, we'll find towards the end of the presentation that increasingly, many states do use the safety standards and for different reasons. So the history of the safety standards goes back quite away. You can see the first one was published in 1958. So just one year after the IAEA was established. In fact, this was the very first publication of the IAEA. The first time we published anything was this book, Safe Handling of Radioisotopes, Safety Series Number One. Then another safety standard that still exists to this day, although it's changed quite a bit since then, is safe transport of radioactive material, sometimes called the transport regulations. And in fact, this is the most widely used safety standard because you can't transport any radioactive material unless you have an agreement between the two states, from one to another, that you're transporting it in a way that both can accept. So that was the first edition of that was published in 1961. The first edition of the basic safety standards for radiation protection, sometimes called the BSS, was published in 1962. And then the very first waste-related safety standard was published in 1965. So you can see it's gone back quite a while. And these had a rather old-fashioned front cover, of course, and they were part of what we call the Safety Series. So the history really from 1958, the first 40 years, the idea, the way it was, was groups of experts on these particular topics were brought together and they wrote a book. And then that's got an IEA logo on the front and it became the standard that you had to meet. So it was sort of a bottom-up approach. We chose experts in different areas and then they wrote what they thought was the most important thing to write. And then it came together and there was a great collection of experience put together. There were safety practices, lists of things that had happened, some guidance was put together. But bit by bit, it began to change. And the requirements, so the sort of more high-level standards began to emerge from this. In the beginning, there was no difference between what's a requirement, what's guidance, what's just a suggestion. There was no real distinction made. But bit by bit, it came to the stage that there were certain statements that were more important than others. So the requirements came out of this. The safety standards, rather than then becoming lots of individual books, began to be grouped together in four structured programs. So we had a program on nuclear safety, a program on radiation protection, a program on waste and a program on transport. And those programs all worked, those four worked sort of individually. And then three safety fundamentals. So really quite high-level statements derived from that. The one that didn't get a safety fundamentals was transport. So nuclear radiation protection and waste. Each one had a sort of statement of their fundamental principles that they issued. And that was the way things were in 1996. But then over the next 10 years, some changes happened. So some internal reorganization happened in the IAEA. Nuclear safety became recognized as being separate from operations. So whereas previously the nuclear safety department had been sort of a section or a division within our nuclear energy department, which assists states with improving their technology. It then became separate. It was recognized that nuclear safety deserved to be separate. That was the nuclear safety department that was established in 1996. And then rather than having four separate programs, the idea came that the four separate programs should be brought together under the commission of safety standards. And then in 2006, the Unified Safety Fundamentals was finally published. So the three existing safety fundamentals were reviewed. And it was determined that some of the content of them was not really at a sort of fundamental principle level. And it was brought together. And the things that were common among the three books were rewritten in this Fundamental Safety Principles, which I really encourage you to read. It's written, it's only about 20 pages long. It's written in very nice and easy language. And it really sets out the concepts and the principles to which we work. So this is the way the situation was up until 2006. And to this day, the commission on safety standards guides our work. So there are senior regulators. So probably in any of your countries, we don't have every member state of the IEA representatives on the commission on safety standards. But if you have a nuclear power plant, your country is certainly represented there. And it's the most senior regulator in your country is on the commission on safety standards. And they meet twice a year and they provide guidance on the approach for the safety standards. And they endorse the texts of the safety standards. So they don't work at a technical level. They work more to political level. And they give a seal of approval to all the technical work that is done below. So the commission on safety standards is very active. They have very firm ideas of the way that the IEA safety standards program should go. And we follow their instruction. And we also give them suggestions as well. So we also have some very pure ideas ourselves. So it's a very good working relationship. For the commission on safety standards, it's the most senior regulator. We have also got for the commission on safety standards, it is always the chief regulator. We also have these other committees, NUSC, RASC, WASC, and TRANS. So the Nuclear Safety Standards Committee, Waste Safety Standards Committee, Radiation and Transport Safety Standards Committee. In that case, the country will nominate the technical expert in the area. But at the higher level, it is the senior regulator in that case. So then since the Unified Safety Fundamentals were published, some changes took place. It was recognized that this bottom-up approach was now part of the past. We wanted to have a more top-down approach with the new fundamentals. A roadmap was established for a long-term structure of the safety requirements. And the idea was to integrate all of the safety standards together into one gigantic book with 130 volumes. And some other developments took place since then there was a recognition that safety and security, nuclear security, are very closely related. So bit by bit through the joint advisory group on nuclear security, there was a task force put together to see how this could happen. And in 2012, the Nuclear Security Guidance Committee was added to those four committees I mentioned before. There was then a fifth committee which covered nuclear security guidance and has nuclear security experts. And the nuclear security is very broad. It's not just, of course, the nuclear regulator who's interested in that. It's law enforcement, it's border control, all sorts of people are interested in nuclear security guidance. It's quite a different range of people have been brought into the process. And Nuclear Security Series is another series of publications in the IEA that are related to the safety standards but still separate. And then a sixth committee was actually added. The Emergence Preparedness and Response Standards Committee was added to the five existing ones. Now we have six committees underneath the safety, well, Nuclear Security Guidance Committee is off to one side, at a technical level. So this was a concrete response to the Fukushima Accident and the idea is that the Emergence Preparedness and Response Standards Committee, which itself also has a lot of experts outside the regulator, necessarily, or anybody who might be involved in it in response to nuclear emergency. There's a lot of efforts there to make the guidance and the standards on Emergence Preparedness and Response consistent and appropriate. So that brings us to where we are today. And this is the vision we work to for the safety standards. The IEA Safety Standards should be the global reference for protecting people and their environment. So the idea is that we would have integrated comprehensive set of standards. So all 130 books are properly integrated. They don't contradict one another and they cover everything that needs to be covered. They don't leave anything out. They should be internationally agreed, so we can't just ignore the concerns of the member states. Member states should have an extensive opportunity to comment on them and guide the development of them. They should be coherent, so they should make sense, they should be consistent with one another. They should be fit for purpose, they should be useful. They shouldn't be incomprehensible and they should be of a high quality. It's not that we're going for the lowest common denominator here. We're really looking to establish standards for safety that really enhance safety. They need to be kept up to date and continuously improved as technology changes and as knowledge increases. They should be scientifically, based on, they should be scientifically sound. They should not just be numbers plucked from thin air but they should be well derived. And we, the IEA doesn't do scientific work in that respect itself. It works with the UNSCEAR, which is the United Nations Committee. Oh, gosh, what does it stand for? Thank you. Good. I can't remember what it stands for. But they gather a lot of the original research on the effects, the health effects of radiation and the ICRP and somebody will tell me what that stands for now. International Committee for Radiation Protection or Radiological Protection, I think they call it. They also do a lot of the very basic research on health effects of radiation and their work feeds into the safety standards. They don't set guidance, they don't set norms, but they do the science behind it and we use their knowledge to develop the safety standards. And the objective then is that we should have a level of safety that is globally harmonized. So it's the same everywhere in the world and at a high level, not higher or lower in different places because if we have an accident in one place somewhere, it is really an accident everywhere. It is a problem for every state no matter where the accident takes place. So it has to be at a high level everywhere. So what we now have at the moment are safety standards, different, three different safety standards categories. You'll see the front covers are a bit different from the front covers from the 1960s. And it's been really well clarified into three different levels. We have one safety fundamentals. It contains the safety objective, which I think Peter mentioned this morning to protect people and the environment from harmful effects of radiation. And 10 principles, the first one being that it's the operator who's responsible for safety. And it's really a very nice book to look at. Then we have 14 safety requirements. Some of them are general safety requirements that apply to everyone. So about the regulatory body or about leadership and management, about emergency preparedness. And then other ones are more specific to different facilities. So we have ones on nuclear power plants, fuel cycle facilities, waste disposal facilities, research reactors, transport. So they're arranged in different ways, either topical or facility specific, but there are 14 of those. And then we have another 110 roughly safety guides. And the safety guides indicate how the safety requirements can be met. They don't have to be met in this way. There could be alternative ways of meeting the safety requirements, but they at least should be as good as, if you choose a different approach, it should be as good as or better than what's set out in the safety guides. And we use different language in each of these three categories. We use the word must in the fundamental safety principles, shall in the requirements and should in the safety guides. And with that, we hope to make it clear what's more and what's less important to be met. So these are the, this is the structure we have at the moment. On the left, so the blue safety fundamentals on the top, in the middle, the red safety requirements, we have general safety requirements, those are the topical ones. And in fact, we don't call those numbers one to seven, we call them part one to part seven because they have to be looked at as a whole. So whatever your facility is that you're, that needs to be made safe, you have to look at all parts one to part seven. And then on the right, the specific safety requirements specific to different facilities. Nuclear power plant safety requirements because they're quite more elaborate, they've been broken up into two parts, one on design and one on operation, but it's still the same book. So that's the structure that exists at the moment. And to get to that vision and those categories, that those safety standards, we have quite an elaborate management system to make this happen. So we set out our strategies for achieving this. The first one being having, that we need to have clear categories. We have those, the three categories you saw. There needs to be a very clear, logical and integrated structure. So it has to make sense the way they work. The scope has to be clear. And in fact, the beginning of every book, the scope is set out. What facility does this apply to? What more importantly, sometimes what does it not apply to? So it has to be very clear what safety standards you should use at any one time. There needs to be consensus on the safety standards at the highest level. That's why we've developed the system with the commission on safety standards. They need to be user friendly. Part of that is the language they're written in, the style, the accessibility of them. The fact that they're, for example, all available on the internet without any fee. There needs to be a manageable number. We could, because they would be right, a thousand safety standards, but we probably couldn't manage to keep them up to date. With the resources that we have in the IEA and the resources that the member states have to devote to this, because it's always extra work from their national regulation, we can usually update about 10 safety standards a year. So if we have 130 and we can only update 10 a year, you can recognize that it's roughly at every 10 or 11 or 12 years that we can revise them. And technology could change faster than that. So we can't actually have more than what we have at the moment. It's really, the number has to be limited to some extent. The processes have to be clear because otherwise how do the member states know how to get involved? If we haven't set out clearly how to be involved, they need to be rigorous and they need to be efficient. And we need to involve the right stakeholders. We need to have proper feedback mechanisms. So when something has been published, we need to make sure that people are using it and if they're using it and not liking it, they have to be able to tell us and we have to respond to that. The terminology we use in all of those different areas from transport to nuclear power plants to leadership has to be somehow consistent and harmonized. Even though the jargon in the different areas might be quite different, somehow the terminology needs to be consistent because people can pick up any of the books and read them. We should promote the safety standards, make sure they do get used. And we should also be aware of the interface between safety and nuclear security because there are of course situations, I'm sure you can imagine them in a nuclear power plant, if the door is locked, it might be secure but not safe because the operator in an accident cannot suddenly get out if he needs to, but you can make sure that the bad guys don't get in. So there are tensions between safety and nuclear security that need to be managed. So this is the process that we use, the sketch of the process that we use to develop the safety standards. And it looks quite complicated here and I can assure you it's even more complicated than that. It takes roughly five years for a safety standard to be developed from scratch. And it may seem like a very long time but the time it takes is, it allows as many stakeholders as possible to be involved in the development of the standards. So we start out with a work plan that the secretariat prepares. We have technical experts in the different areas. So for example, Peter is the expert in nuclear power plant operation. He would prepare a work plan and it would be reviewed by the safety standards committees and the commission on safety standards. And only when they are happy with the work plan, which might in itself take a couple of years to develop and get consensus on, only then can we actually proceed with writing the safety standard. So it begins with drafting. We get consultants in from member states, different experts, and they put together a draft, a first draft, or a pretty good first draft after a while, but in itself taking a year, depending on how long, it's not just that the expert staff member of the IA does the work, but really there's a lot of effort made to get expertise from the member states in. And when a good draft has been prepared, the review committees, that's the NUSC, RASC, WASC, EPRESC, these technical committees, who are also at quite a high level, they get a chance to review it and they say, yes, it's good enough to send to member states. And that means we enable all member states of the IA, we have 160 member states, we officially, through diplomatic channels, request them to give comments on this draft of the safety standard. And we allow them 120 days to do so. And it's not very long actually, because the processes within different countries can be longer or shorter. By the time the person in the embassy is notified of this until they pass it on to the person, the coordinator in the country, who's going to do it until they pass it out to the different experts in the different areas and get all the comments back in and sort them out and make sure that they're not inconsistent and send them back to the IA, it's 120 days is a pretty short time, it's four months and it's not very long. Then all those comments come back in and there's a technical officer in the IA whose job it is for each safety standard, different technical officer for each safety standard, it's their job to resolve these comments. And then you can also imagine that there's quite a lot of conflict between the comments because countries will have wildly different ideas of what is appropriate right in there. So that's quite challenging. Then the review committees get another chance to look at the draft and they often help with resolving the comments from the member states if they couldn't be resolved by a technical officer. And sometimes that takes a couple of goals as well. These review committees they meet twice a year. So if they don't approve it one time, you've got to wait another six months until they do it again, until they can see it again. So you can see that this is building up to quite a long process overall, but certainly in a process with an involvement of a lot of stakeholders. And finally, when the draft is technically very good and also when it has been technically edited and ensured that the language is consistent with the IA safety standards approach, that there are no contradictions with another safety standard that has been published when it's really in a very, very good state except for perhaps a couple of typos and so on. Then it will be given for endorsement to the commission and safety standards and usually they just endorse it. And sometimes they don't, but usually they do. And if it is the safety fundamentals or safety requirements, it then goes to the IA's Board of Governors, which is at the ambassador level. And again, because they're convinced that our process has been done rigorously and properly and because we have convinced them of that, they usually also agree to the safety standard and establish it. And then it's sent for publication. So it turns into a book and it's put as a PDF on the website and it can be used. So this is the process. We have written it down in quite an elaborate manual or number of manuals to follow because you can imagine the interaction between technical things and diplomatic things is quite hard to manage sometimes. So yes, this is more what the process looks like in real life. Sorry, go ahead. Previous slide. That's a very good question. Well, that kind of thing is decided at the very beginning, the outline of the work plan. It would never change its category as it's being drafted. So it's right at the very start, the very first box here, the proposal would be put forward for safety guide or safety requirements. But it also has to be in line with what I described as the long-term structure that was established in 2008 and agreed by the Commission on Safety Standards. So the Commission on Safety Standards doesn't just endorse individual standards, but it has a concept in mind. So we have a list of standards that we're working to and we don't expect to develop others beyond that. The standards are written in a way that is technologically neutral. So if there is a new development of, for example, a PivotBed reactor, it doesn't matter. The same standards that apply for another type of nuclear reactor will also apply for a new nuclear reactor. Now, there are things that are happening. For example, we're not entirely sure if our safety standards are appropriate for small modular reactors at the moment. We think they are, but we haven't really gone into a huge amount of detail about that. So there are technological changes which could eventually affect a change in the safety standards structure and the concepts as a whole, but not at the moment. What is more likely to happen is that there will be a request to revise a safety standard earlier than had been anticipated because of something, for example, the Fukushima accident happening or something like that. But a new topic is rare. It's pretty well established at this stage. What topics we should cover. Yeah. Yes. Which one are you on? I'm not a scientist, I'm just a scientist. OK. So you're all a scientist, and you know what we have to do. So I don't know, is there any initiation for a plan or any control for the plan? Well, according to the process, we allow, we upload to the website before every meeting, two months before every meeting, all the drafts that would be subject to review. And we expect you to review all six of them within the two months. Now, depending of course which office you're from, but you may have a huge infrastructure at home backing you up to do that and have plenty of people you could outsource that work to, or you might have to do it all yourself. So some of the member states managed to review all of them because they have a lot of people who are dedicated to this work, but of course that's not the case for all of them. So this relates to what I was talking about, the manageable number of safety standards. And I agree, particularly in the NOSC area, there are a huge number of safety standards and it could well be that we have surpassed the manageable number at this stage, because if you don't review them properly, if you don't have time, then we don't really know if we've written something useful or not. And if it's not useful, it won't be used. There was no point in doing the whole work in the first place. So certainly that is a kind of interesting feedback to get, that we may need to cut the number of safety standards, or we may need to consider whether putting, we should put more emphasis on certain topics and ask for dedicated review of those and let the others just go. So there are certain challenges with the process as a whole. Do you want to answer this with Peter? Because you've probably had more detail on a risk... Well, the practice for resolving is through the review committees, but if you can give an example of contradictory comments, I'm not sure. What is placed on the last, I think most people do, we then strip the table resolution, but we will get all the time to get that. So we're all gathered together in the individual course, all by individual groups. And then they'll say, OK, so we've got a comment on section 1.1. But then we'll do it and say, OK, is this a fundamental public department, or issue, or let's say, we would just sit in it with the wording. So we'll gather all the technicals together. I mean, if there is, if there's really, if there's one question, one question, one question, then we have to go out and put those questions together. And I'm sure that some side of the question are aligned to what we're telling the side. But there's no other way. So if we really use a matter of technical negotiation and an introduction, they can't put it together. So if you will get all the time... Yes. And we have to, because we can't possibly resolve all of them. That's what I wanted to show with this slide here, that although we do have this rigorous process in place, as Peter mentioned, a lot of it is down to individual negotiation with particular commenters. And sometimes even the comments from the particular country will be contradictory if they've got a couple of experts to comment on something. Even those experts will have contradicted one another. And then the coordinator in that country will have sent them on to the IEA. And what are we supposed to do if France can't agree what its position is on this? You know, it's even more difficult for us to resolve it then. So a lot of it is individual negotiation. There are... I hesitate to say this, but it is somehow true that although we have a very rigorous 14 step process, in the 12 years that I've worked at the IEA, I don't think even one safety standard has precisely followed that process. There's always been some kind of deviation in order to achieve this consensus, which is such a challenge to achieve. So a lot of it is through personal contacts, knowing the experts, knowing how one could resolve... Well, if I take it out here, but I put it in here instead, would that work? Oh, yes, that would work. So being creative in finding solutions and so on. It's quite a challenge for the technical officer who has to manage the development of a new safety standard. That's right, yeah. Exactly. Mm-hmm. That's right, so that's all part of the drafting stage of putting together the first draft. The consultancy meeting might have five or six really good experts whom the technical officer happens to know from different countries, but it's a good outcome from a consultancy meeting. Doesn't mean that you have a consensus over all IEA member states. So you might move on to a technical meeting as well, or you invite a lot of other countries to be involved. So that is each safety standard, depending on the topic as well, depending on the length of it, some of them are 20 pages long, some of them are 180 pages long, depending on whether they're very technical or we have one, for example, communication that everybody commented on because everybody knows about communication. So you might get a very few number of comments. For example, in the fuel cycle area, we don't have that many countries that have fuel cycle facilities or certain, well, let's say we reprocessing facilities or something where there's not a great number of countries in the world doing this. And then in transport, you'll have every country involved. So it varies very much depending on the safety standard. Go ahead. That's correct here, board of governors. Yeah. The safety centers are never binding, even if they've gone up to the board of governors. Yes, yeah, then it will be binding, yeah. So it has never happened that the IA has voted on a safety standard. The board of governors, I'm not sure of the board of governors' procedures if it would ever be possible to do that. The most dramatic thing that I have ever witnessed is that a safety standard was taken off the agenda once in advance before it could be discussed because, again, the personal connections, it was made known to us that a certain member state was not happy with a particular statement and a particular safety standard and would be unlikely to endorse it at the board. So in order to avoid that diplomatic embarrassment, it was taken off the agenda. And a completely different approach was the statement was taken out on the condition that that member state, which was conducting a process which we didn't want to endorse, would then undergo a safety review mission to see if their process was safe or not. So a completely, quite an unusual approach was taken to bringing that safety standard forward. But at the board level, usually it's a question of rubber stamping because the work has gone on in advance. There are briefings to the board in advance where they get to ask the really nasty questions and they hopefully have their concerns assured. At the moment, we have a safety standard on nuclear fuel cycle facilities that's going to the board next month. And so far I have heard that it will go through. One always knows somehow in advance that it will be fine. And I hope that that is the case. I hope nobody changes their mind about that. This is quite difficult to withdraw something and then put it back on. So now I want to just bring you up to date with a couple of things that we've been working on recently over the last couple of years. After the Fukushima accident, the IAA developed an action plan and it covered a lot of different areas. And one of the areas was the IAA safety standards. And there was a request by the member states of the IAA and then at the end of 2011 to look at the safety standards and see if they really were fit for purpose. Or if there was really, if the safety standards had been better, perhaps the Fukushima accident wouldn't have happened. To look like that, to look at that scenario. So the request was to review and strengthen the IAA safety standards and to improve their implementation. So we conducted a very rigorous systematic review of all of the safety standards and we took into account the lessons that had been learned from the Fukushima accident. We couldn't look at all 130, it would have been unwieldy. So we looked particularly at the safety requirements that are applicable to nuclear power plants and to the storage of spent fuel. And we used the feedback from the national evaluations, different countries evaluations of Fukushima accident. We looked at the EU stress tests that had gone on in the intervening years. We had a number of high level international expert meetings, meetings of the Convention on Nuclear Safety. All of the input from that was looked at and a gap analysis was drawn up to see where the safety standards adequate, if they had been better, would the Fukushima accident have occurred? And the result of that was that there were actually determined to be no major gaps in the safety standards. So it wasn't that the safety standards were lacking. Nevertheless, we took the opportunity to strengthen them somewhat. So I talk here about overarching requirements and associated paragraphs and things. The requirements are structured in a way that there's some text in bold, some shell statements in bold, we call those overarching requirements. And then there's some associated requirements. They're not less important, but topically they're related to the overarching requirements. So there were no new overarching requirements. We made a few changes to some of the overarching requirements. This is, I'm talking about all safety requirements now and modified a few paragraphs and added a few additional paragraphs. But the idea wasn't that the safety standards were lacking, it's just we took an opportunity to strengthen them in the light of the lessons from the Fukushima accident. And I mentioned that the process takes five years. So we've just come to the end of that process. And in fact, the last one on the list, the safety of nuclear fuel cycle facilities is the one I talked about going to the board next month. We expect it will be published at the end of the year. So you can see that we addressed governmental legal and regulatory framework for safety, leadership and management, safety assessment, preparedness and response for nuclear emergency. We looked at site evaluation, the safety of nuclear power plants, both the design and the operation, and the safety of research reactors. So all of those safety requirements were looked at. Some of them were revised in a way that we called by amendment. So just a few small tweaks. And some of them were completely rewritten because they were really very old. For example, the safety of research reactors hadn't been issued since, I think, 2005. So it was really due a complete revision at that point, same with the safety of nuclear fuel cycle facilities as well. So leadership and management for safety was also completely rewritten. So there were different approaches to it. But all of these new safety requirements published this year and last year, 2015, I think the earliest one, they all responded to the strengthening of the requirements that had been requested following the Fukushima accident. Yeah. For the small modular reactors. Why they didn't take the opportunity at this point to bring in the SMRs? You mean? Yes, yes. Well, there isn't agreement on this at the moment as to whether the safety standards do or do not adequately cover the SMRs. It's not, some countries believe it, they do and some believe they don't. So it's not, there's no consensus at the moment as to whether we need to revise them. They should follow the safety requirements that exist. I don't think that is the case because, well, actually I don't know because I'm not an expert in SMRs, but my understanding is that the way that the safety requirements have been written is that the same concepts and principles can also be applied. I think Peter explained that in a certain way this morning as well. So it is, you're right, it is something we should look at. I mean, I shouldn't just discount it entirely. The reason we didn't do it now was that there was an agreement among member states to focus on the lessons learned from Fukushima. So there were not lessons relating to SMRs learned from Fukushima, it's a separate topic. So there was somehow a concern in these revisions that if we allow another topic in like SMRs then somebody else will want another topic in and somebody else will want another topic in and then the whole thing will be up for grabs and we'll never get to the end of the process. It was important also politically that we do actually issue these in a timely manner, at least within five years after the Fukushima accident. If we had opened them up fully for a complete revision, it might be 10 or 15 years before we actually can come to any kind of agreement on it. So there are other issues other than technical issues that go into the decisions here. So this was the output anyway from the revisions following the Fukushima accident. Yes, there is. And it is in fact what I mentioned before in 1996. So 10 years after Chernobyl, the Nuclear Department of Nuclear Safety and Security was established. It took 10 years from Chernobyl up to the restructuring of the IEA, the establishment of a combined program with the commission of safety standards. So that was the response to Chernobyl. It was also quite a long term thing. So we do respond to things. It wasn't that we issued a few new safety standards but it was really quite a significant change was made then. And this is something else that is quite new. I wanted to sort of advertise a little bit. I talked about the safety standards should be user friendly and part of that is accessibility. And you might have been a bit confused when I was talking about the fact that there are 130 safety standards and how could anybody possibly be able to navigate their way through them? And it is pretty difficult to understand. I mean, even as an expert, sometimes I get lost and can't remember where things are. But we've established a content management system. So it's a computer system. It contains all the safety standards but more than just the books themselves, it contains links between them. And it's also used to develop the safety standards at the moment or we're doing it on a pilot basis. We're not using it for all of them at the moment but for some of them. So the idea is that when we review or revise safety standards, it should be done on the basis of really systematic collection of feedback and not just at a whim. And any revisions have to be justified so that the safety standards remain stable. They should be technically consistent. So we have to make sure that they're all consistent with one another to be able to look at all of them at once. Semantically consistent, which means that the language and the terminology should be the same in all of them. We can check that they're complete by doing a gap analysis rather easily. And the main thing I think that is interesting for you if you're going to be using safety standards is that they're more accessible now. So that's the link. I'm not sure will the students be able to get the slides. Ashok? Okay, good. So you'll get all the links anyway and you don't need to know them down. So for accessibility of the safety standards, it's pretty good. So we have on the left here, if you open up a safety standard in the NSSW system, my boss who got the system together is French and he's very happy that it's a French abbreviation for it. So on the left here, we have what you would see if you open up, for example, GSR Part 6 and decommissioning. So not just the text, this is how the book would start, but you would also be given a good deal of information on what other safety standards you might want to look at. And then within each safety standard, you can see the links between all the requirements. You can see how they link to the different safety guides. You can see how they would interface with these other books, which are the nuclear security series books. And you'd also be able to see, get information on the safety glossary and be able to see what the definition is of all of the terms we use. Because we do use terms in a sometimes a pretty unusual way. I mean, for example, radioactive material is not usually used in its scientific sense rather than its regulatory sense. So it's not that the material is radioactive, but the material is an activity above a certain level that it needs then to be regulated. So there are certain terms that are used in a rather unusual way in the safety standard. So you can see the terms here will be highlighted and the abbreviation will pop out. And you can also search in a different way. There's interesting dropdown menus if you're interested in a particular facility or a particular aspect of the facility. You can look through it. So I think it's going to be a pretty cool resource for access from the outside and also for our development of the safety standards. So to finish up or to go rather quickly now, how are the safety standards used? Because I said they're not binding on member states. So what some states do actually formally adopt them into their national regulations. Some of them adapt them slightly. They're also referenced. Or they use as a source of, there are some source material to develop national regulations. And the way we know who's using the safety standards for what is through the review committees and through the commission on safety standards. At every one of these meetings we ask, we take it in turns and ask the member states to explain how they use the safety standards. And so those are the general, the four approaches that people use that states use. They're also used as a sort of benchmarking exercise. So they're not directly in the national regulations, but the national regulations are benchmarked periodically against the safety standards to see if they're up to scratch. And again, they can be used directly. Some of them are used more than others. So for example, the transport regulations, I mentioned they're used worldwide. The basic safety standards are also almost universally accepted. Many of our safety standards are not just established by the IAEA, but also by many other UN organizations, such as the World Health Organization. And some of those other UN organizations have more member states than we have. So we have 160, but I think the World Health Organization has 190. So it increases the expansion to other smaller member states who may actually really want to use these safety standards directly. The European Commission has incorporated safety fundamentals directly into EU legislation. And Wenra also used this safety standards for a benchmarking exercise around eight or 10 years ago to harmonize the national regulations in Western Europe. So those are different ways that they've been used. And then here are some links. So this is the safety standards website on the top. There's an awful lot of information on that about the safety standards. This file here, the status, is updated very, very quickly, at least once a month. So at the moment, we have 129 safety standards published. It stays around 130 because sometimes one new safety standard comes out and replaces two or sometimes one is split into two, depending on how the development has gone. We usually have around 50 at any one time in revision. So 130 roughly published, 50 in revision. There are, within this PDF file, there are hyperlinks to the safety standards. The IA has six official languages, which I'm sure you guys know. Can you tell me what they are? New official languages of the IA? English? French? Yeah, in French you mentioned Russian, exactly. Yeah, Russian, so the work is done in English, but some of them are translated and not all of them. So the safety fundamentals and the safety requirements are all translated into all official languages. And then we run out of money because we don't have enough money to translate all of the safety guides, unfortunately. Some of them are translated because we get individual financial contributions from different member states who are particularly interested in a particular language and a particular topic. So we manage to get some of the safety guides translated, but we don't have all of them, unfortunately, don't have all of them translated into all languages. And in fact, it is quite a challenge, as you can imagine, to translate all of this. We have professional translators in the IA, but they have a lot of other work to do as well, not just the safety standards. So sometimes there are difficulties with getting the meaning right and so on. And actually, unlike other cases where sometimes people say, well, the original language is the authoritative one, English is the authoritative one, that's not the case here. Actually, all of them are authoritative, which is a bit difficult if they contradict one another. So that's something we have to resolve and we do a lot of work with the translators to make sure that the translations are as good as they possibly can be. Then the safety glossary is another great resource. It exists in the six official languages and it explains all of these terms and how they're used. We don't have a glossary, we don't have a definition for every single technical term or every single term. Some terms you can open a dictionary, you find what that is and then you use that. So there's only specific ones that are used in an unusual way and where the context needs to be explained and so on. Those appear in the safety glossary. And then if you want to access all of the safety standards, you can download them. This is a link to the English version, but I think that you can also download all the language ones as well in one go. It's a huge file of very many megabytes. So yeah, the final remarks. The safety standards, they present an international consensus on what constitutes a high level of safety. They aim to protect health, minimize danger to life and property. They're based on an international consensus and they are consistent, provide a technically sound basis for decision making. Many states use them for national regulations and they're applied by regulatory bodies and operators in nuclear power generation. They're also used by the IEA in its projects and its safety review missions and they support and are consistent with the international treaties, the conventions and the codes of conduct. So if you have any questions, you can ask me now or we can wait until after the coffee break we have a discussion forum then at that point. Thank you very much.