Being prepared for radiological and nuclear emergencies and ready to mitigate their effects is a challenge for all countries. In the past decade, more than 30 IAEA Member States have reached out to the Agency for help in this work by requesting the IAEA's Emergency Preparedness and Review (EPREV) service.
From 14 to 17 July 2014 in Vienna, Austria, the IAEA is hosting a Technical Meeting to allow experts to share experiences from these missions and discuss how the EPREV service can be further improved.
"As recent experience has painfully reminded us, emergency preparedness and response are key components of a solid defence-in-depth strategy," said Denis Flory, IAEA Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, to meeting participants during the opening session.
He added that all Member States, not just those with nuclear power programmes, need to be prepared and ready to respond to nuclear and radiological emergencies.
The IAEA Incident and Emergency Centre, which coordinates EPREV missions, works to ensure that the missions are useful to all countries, including those with well-developed nuclear technology programmes and those developing or expanding such programmes.
At the four-day Technical Meeting, participants will be sharing their countries' national EPREV mission experiences and discuss lessons learned from the EPREV process and from other IAEA peer-review services. The final session aims to produce recommendations on how to further strengthen the EPREV process and how to measure its effectiveness.
Background
EPREV missions provide a peer review by IAEA and international experts of a country's preparedness for nuclear and radiological emergencies and its capability to respond to such situations.
EPREV missions are based on international standards, taking into account the risk profile and legal framework in each host country. They aim to identify areas for improvement as well as examples of good practices by each host country that can be shared with the international emergency preparedness and response community.
The scope of an EPREV mission can range from the peer review of the arrangements at a specific installation to a peer review of all of the arrangements in the country, including on-site, off-site and national preparedness.