Responsibility for the safe handling of nuclear fuels

Safety as a company duty Source: BASE

Safety as a company duty

The Atomic Energy Act stipulates that every step in the life cycle of nuclear fuels, from production to final storage, must be designed in such a way that safety is always guaranteed. To this end, the implementing company, i.e. the operator of a plant or the transport company, must put safety first in all decisions and processes ("safety first"). The primary responsibility for safety lies with the operator.

The main activities are:

• Uranium enrichment
• Fuel element production
• Transport to the nuclear power plant
• Use of the fuel elements in the nuclear power plant
• Loading of transport and storage casks, transfer to the interim storage facility
• Interim storage
• If necessary, transport to (another) interim storage facility or directly to the final repository.
• Final storage

All these activities either have been, are, or will be approved and carried out in Germany.

The Atomic Energy Act creates corresponding state control functions to ensure that the operators implement the "safety first" principle permanently and reliably. Corresponding essential regulations are summarised in the second section of the Atomic Energy Act "Supervision regulations” in particular. The company as the licence holder and the state supervisory bodies thus have a common task, which they perform separately, according to their different roles: to maintain safety at a required high level. How this is done is explained in more detail below.

Requirements for safe operation

The Atomic Energy Act specifically determines the essential requirements towards the operator within the framework of safe operation for each of the respective activities – requirements for interim storage, for example, are laid out in paragraph 6 of the Atomic Energy Act. These requirements include - among others

• proof of the appropriate expertise of the staff,
• proof of precautions against damage caused by the respective activity ("technical safety") and
• proof of protection against malicious interference with operations ("interference measures or other third-party interference" - SEWD).

The Atomic Energy Act also defines similar requirements for transports - and deliberately does so in a very abstract manner. This enables the competent Ministry of the Environment and the technical committees to adapt the design of the requirements to current findings time and again, without the need for legislative amendment procedures. Ordinances and technical regulations ("rules and regulations") are used to achieve this.

The evolving specification of the requirements corresponds to the Federal Constitutional Court's demand that the safety requirements must guarantee a "dynamic protection of fundamental rights", namely the fundamental rights to life, health and property.

Examination and assessment: licencing and supervision

State institutions therefore examine and evaluate the company's plans, precautions and ongoing activities. The benchmarks used are the legal requirements and other rules and regulations, which the operator must comply with. To understand the role of BASE as a licensing authority, it is important to distinguish between two different inspection and assessment tasks in terms of their objective and their chronological sequence:

• Prior to the commencement of an activity, the licensing authority examines and assesses, on the basis of an application, whether an activity fulfils the licensing requirements of the Atomic Energy Act in accordance with these plans and regulations. The examination is based on specific plans, quality requirements and, for example, planned work regulations. The basic safety concepts are designed to be "robust" against disturbances, i.e. there is no threat of serious consequences in the event of limited deviations from the "target range".
• If the licensing authority issues a licence, the company must subsequently prove to the supervisory authority that all legal and licence requirements are indeed met. If the nuclear supervisory authority confirms this, the company may start operation. The nuclear supervisory authority also examines the ongoing operation, and assesses whether the company complies with the requirements on a permanent basis.

Identify and eliminate deviations in operation: Supervision tasks

Should there be deviations from the licensed operation or other justified doubts regarding safety, the nuclear supervisory authorities will investigate these issues. Such issues may arise both from the activities of the enterprise and from external findings.

In such cases, the nuclear supervisory authority will require additional measures or evidence to be able to assess safety beyond any doubt. The enterprise must plan countermeasures and propose solutions as to how the specific situation can be addressed. The supervisory authority will examine and evaluate these, and agree to their implementation if they are suitable. If necessary, the authority will also call for further concrete measures.

Deviations from the planned operation or doubts about safety will thus be eliminated within a reasonable period of time, and the framework set by the licence and regulations will be adhered to. As a rule, due to the "robust", multi-level safety concept, safety is not significantly impaired by such individual deviations.

Identification and elimination of deviations from the basis for approval: Tasks of the licencing authority

In certain cases, however, the issues that arise can be serious enough to jeopardise the framework for safe operation as defined by the licence. This is the case, for example, if underlying key assumptions regarding proof of safety turn out to be incorrect from the point of view of the licensing authority.

In this situation the licensing authority - which under normal circumstances does not intervene in ongoing operations - must act in accordance with Section 17 of the Atomic Energy Act. The licensing authority will conduct its own reviews and assessments and, if necessary, also obtain information from the supervisory authority and the operator. If the review and assessment were to show that, from a current perspective, the licence had relevant deficits, the licensing authority would add further requirements or restrictions ("conditions") to the licence, adjusting it to ensure full safety.

If such additional conditions were not sufficient to ensure safety, the licensing authority would revoke the permit.

This has not yet happened in the area of responsibility of BASE as a licensing authority.

Overview of responsibilities