Bilateral meeting with the Indian safety regulator in Mumbai
Information notice
An ASN delegation, led by its Chairman Bernard Doroszczuk, travelled to Mumbai on 5 March 2024 to meet its Indian counterpart, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) and its Chairman Shri Dinesh Kumar Shukla. This meeting was organised as part of the cooperation agreement that has linked the two safety regulators for nearly 25 years now.
India has a large and rapidly expanding nuclear fleet, built around various technologies (23 reactors in operation and 13 under construction or planned).
This meeting was an opportunity to discuss current and future safety issues and the organisation put into place by the regulators to address them.
The technical discussions in particular covered the continued operation of the nuclear power plants (NPPs), safety improvements to the reactors in service, emergency preparedness and response, and the approaches adopted by the safety regulators to examine and evaluate new reactor technologies, notably small modular reactors (SMR).
The AERB is also one of the rare nuclear safety regulators in the world to have its own in-house nuclear safety and radiation protection research institute, and a specific session was devoted to this topic on 7 March.
A visit to the Tarapur NPP, about a hundred kilometres from Mumbai, was organised by the AERB on 6 March. This field visit was an opportunity to cover subjects such as the organisation of the regulation and oversight of nuclear activities in the two countries and the implementation of safety reinforcement measures following the Fukushima Daiichi accident.
The two authorities agreed to strengthen their cooperation in the future and ASN Chairman Bernard Doroszczuk invited his counterpart Shri Dinesh Kumar Shukla to come to France in late 2025 or early 2026 for the next high-level bilateral meeting.
Date of last update : 13/03/2024