WENRA is today publishing revised versions of two of its reports covering its Safety Reference Levels (SRLs) for Radioactive Waste Disposal Facilities and its Safety Reference Levels (SRLs) for Radioactive Waste Treatment & Conditioning. These reports were last published in 2014 and 2018 respectively and the revised versions provide updates on the benchmarking of the national regulatory frameworks of 18 WENRA members that has been carried out since the previous publication dates.
Simon Morgan from the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation and Chair of WENRA’s Working Group on Waste & Decommissioning (WGWD) said: “Benchmarking against SRLs helps national nuclear safety regulators track how well their national frameworks rate against WENRA’s SRLs which can be seen as the ‘gold standard’ for nuclear safety regulation. SRLs build on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Safety Standards as a baseline, and also incorporate an overlay of the ‘best practices’ of WENRA members so that we can drive further improvements right across Europe by harmonising our regulatory requirements to reach the highest levels.
The SRLs are standards for regulators and for national legal frameworks; WENRA checks how each country is performing and gives a rating of A, B or C against each and every Safety Reference Level. For C ratings where improvements are needed to achieve current best practice, countries establish national action plans and when these are implemented they come back to us to be benchmarked again. And we do all of this in a transparent, cooperative and friendly way aimed at helping national regulators to improve. Building on the re-publication of our SRL Reports for Waste Storage and Decommissioning in 2024, we have now completed the benchmarking of all four sets of Waste & Decommissioning SRLs, and this represents a significant achievement by WENRA’s members. I am pleased to recognise the strong achievements of the report authors Bengt Hedberg from Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten (SSM) the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority and Isabel Sierra from Eidgenössisches Nuklearsicherheitsinspektorat (ENSI) in Switzerland in completing the reports, and also the members of the Working Group who carried out the self-assessments and benchmarking, and coordinated the improvements in each of our countries. We can now proudly say that regulatory requirements for radioactive waste management and decommissioning are almost completely harmonised right across the 18 WENRA members who participated, and the regulatory frameworks in those 18 countries have been rated to have achieved a higher standard than ever before.”
Report Radioactive Waste Disposal Facilities Safety Reference Levels, V 2.3
Report Radioactive Waste Treatment and Conditioning Safety Reference Levels, V. 1.2
