ASN took part in several working meetings on the margins of the IAEA General Conference in Vienna (Austria)

Bernard Doroszczuk, ASN Chairman, and several members of the ASN Commission and Director General’s office, took part in various meetings with the heads of the nuclear safety regulators organised in Vienna from 16 to 20 September 2019, in the margins of the IAEA General Conference.

The ASN Chairman took part in the 13^th meeting of the MDEP (Multilateral Design Evaluation Programme) strategy group. The MDEP is an association of sixteen safety regulators, created in 2006; the programme set up a cooperation framework which is particularly useful for evaluating new nuclear reactor designs. This year, the various subjects dealt with by strategy group - which brings together the heads of the safety regulators every year to define the orientations of the programme - included the question of the future of this association: this is because, for most of the reactor designs concerned – the EPR, the American AP 1000 and the Korean APR 1400 in particular – the MDEP’s work has now entered its final phase and the programme is moving towards closure in 2022. ASN and its partners concerned (Finland, United Kingdom and China) are envisaging the creation of a new cooperative framework specifically for operation of the EPR reactor. The MDEP will also be organising a conference in China in 2020 at which the results of its work will be presented.

Lightbox

In the margins of the IAEA General Conference, Bernard Doroszczuk also met counterparts from the nuclear safety regulators of eight other countries, brought together under the umbrella of the International Nuclear Regulators’ Association (INRA[1]). All underlined the major challenge involved in making preparations for the training of experts in order to ensure efficient renewal of the staff of all the regulators. Bernard Doroszczuk notably stressed the need to pass knowledge on to the next generation, recalling that in the nuclear field, all projects are long-term.

Together with Rumina Velshi, his counterpart in the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), he signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation and information exchange between the two regulators, renewed for a five-year period.

Finally, the ASN Chairman met his Swedish counterpart, Nina Cromnier, Director General of the SSM (Swedish Radiation Safety Authority). Both were pleased to note the strong bilateral relations maintained between ASN and the SSM and confirmed that the ASN headquarters in Montrouge would host the next bilateral meeting between the two authorities in October 2019.