Nuclear power station Doel II: Pressure Vessel Steel Surveillance - Programme Capsule Doel II/5

In the early 80's quality assurance policies were introduced in the field of nuclear waste management. Quality assurance was first formally and widely applied in the United States by the Department of Defense, in particular in the Polaris submarine programme. As any other industrial activity the radioactive waste management requires quality assurance. Quality assurance in general is defined as "all planned and systematic actions to provide adequate confidence that the entire system, the processes and the products involved will satisfy given
requirements for quality "[I].
More than ten years ago the European Commission through its Plan of Action recognized the importance of a sound QA approach in the field of nuclear waste management. In 1982 the EC Plan of Action created a working group to review the current status of implementation of production standards and quality assurance for radioactive waste in Europe. As.a conclusion it was stated that QA would help to provide confidence in the safe management of radioactive waste. This confidence implies that QA is applied by responsible operators and based upon effective regulation by national authorities. The need for QA in radioactive waste management is also further justified by examples of problems in this field "if QA had been applied properly.." [1]. The creation in the early 80's of the different national authorities for the management of radioactive waste also helped to establish quality programmes. Reviews on quality assurance requirements and potential implementations for waste packages were also prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency [2,3,4]. In these reviews
considerations on both disposal and conditioning are given.
A global QA programme requires as a final step the control or verification ("checking") of the quality of the product (the radioactive waste package) by an organism independent of the waste conditioner. This final quality checking can also be motivated based on practical experience. This is especially true for conditioning processes which suffer from an incomplete qualification before starting, or incomplete quality control during conditioning.
The EC Plan of Action recommended in 1989 the constitution of an ad-hoc group of experts to advise on how to implement this final product control. More precisely the objective was "to examine the needs, incentives, scope and ways of implementation of a European Network of national QA/QC facilities for radioactive waste products". As one action the expert group reviewed the laboratories with quality checking capability for radioactive waste.
The ad-hoc group agreed that collaboration in a European Network would be of considerable benefit for the operators of national laboratories performing regulatory checks on radioactive waste. This European collaboration would also be beneficial for the regulatory or licensing organisation taking decisions on the basis of such checks and for the safe management of radioactive waste in general.