It is with great pleasure that I open this important IAEA Conference and welcome you to Vienna. The Secretariat of the Agency will assist you in practical legal and technical matters as you find appropriate. As observers the professional Agency staff might also present its views on issues which may arise.
We all know that the many and diverse uses of radiation and radioactive material world-wide have produced great benefits and continue to do so. We are also aware that from the outset a concern for safety has been a special hallmark of nuclear activities. This concern with safety has applied not least to spent sources and to waste. No technology, no matter how beneficial, can be considered truly sustainable unless the waste and by-products that it generates can be managed safely. Perhaps equally important if the technology is to enjoy widespread acceptance is that the wastes need to be seen to be managed safely. Certainly this is true of radioactive waste or spent fuel.
The non-proliferation aspects of managing spent fuel and radioactive waste have long been considered to be of international concern, and we have established the IAEA safeguards systems to meet this concern by verification on the basis of binding agreements. Other aspects of the safe management of radioactive waste and spent fuel have historically been considered to be largely national in nature. The general responsibility for safety has rested, and continues to rest, with the national authorities. However, gradually international norms, including binding conventions on a range of safety related issues have come to be seen as elements which help to promote global safety culture.
The IAEA has long been and remains a major contributor to the development of agreed international nuclear safety norms. The safety of radioactive waste management was first seen as having an international dimension in the context of the disposal of solid waste into the sea, a practice which was widely favoured from the early days of nuclear energy until well into the 1970s. It is perhaps not surprising that the IAEA's first major publication on nuclear waste management - in 1961 - set out safety procedures and practices for waste disposal at sea.
Underground disposal of radioactive wastes has been practised for at least as long as marine disposal, but there has been less tendency to regard it as a matter of international concern. The IAEA issued guidance on underground disposal as early as 1965 but interest in the safety of land disposal as an international issue only gradually gathered momentum in the 1970s and 1980s. Over this time, the IAEA built up a comprehensive collection of Safety Series documents on underground disposal. By the late 1980s radioactive waste disposal, even though the amounts were relatively small and the technology was known, had acquired an increasing importance as a social and political issue, and the IAEA responded by creating a high profile family of Safety documents - the Radioactive Waste Safety Standards, or RADWASS - to document the international consensus in this area.
The IAEA was not, of course, alone in addressing waste management as an international issue. Other international and national organizations made major contributions towards the development of a global consensus on waste safety. Special mention should be made of the work of the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD in exploring many of the issues raised by the special characteristics of waste management.
Waste management is much more than just disposal, and the RADWASS documents also address pre-disposal aspects, such as waste characterisation, segregation, conditioning and packaging. The International Basic Safety Standards for Protection against Ionizing Radiation and for the Safety of Radioactive Sources establish the basic requirements for protection against the risks associated with exposure to ionizing radiation. The area with the most obvious international aspect, the transport of waste, is already covered not only by the IAEA 'Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Materials' but also by the IAEA 'Code of Practice on the International Transboundary Movement of Radioactive Waste'. One of the objectives of the present draft text of a convention has been to incorporate the substantive provisions of the Code of Practice into what will become a binding instrument.
The management of spent fuel has a history all of its own and the IAEA has responded to the different approaches which have been taken with a series of documents on the design, operation and safety assessment of spent fuel storage facilities.
The development of the Convention on Nuclear Safety and the draft Joint Convention which you will consider and, I hope adopt, are major steps beyond the Agency consensus standards which existed before.
During the development of the Convention on Nuclear Safety in the early 1990s, many participants proposed that the safety issues related to the management of radioactive waste should be included in that Convention. No consensus was reached on this but the Preamble to the Nuclear Safety Convention did affirm "the need to begin promptly the development of an international convention on the safety of radioactive waste management as soon as the ongoing process to develop waste management safety fundamentals has resulted in broad international agreement". This message was reinforced in a Resolution adopted by the 1994 IAEA General Conference.
Accordingly, in March 1995 I established an Open-ended Group of Technical and Legal experts and charged them with the task of drafting a Convention. You might say that I asked them to 'pick up where the Convention on Nuclear Safety left off'. Quite wisely the earlier convention was used by the Group as a model for the new one.
In some respects, then, it could be said that the experts who elaborated on the present draft Joint Convention had the advantage of hindsight over the drafters of the Convention on Nuclear Safety. However, they had many new difficult questions to address. One example of this is the fact that only at the final meeting of the Group of Experts was there agreement to the position of spent fuel management within the structure of the draft Convention. Another indication of the complexity of the task might be the number of definitions required in the Joint Convention - 21 - compared with only 3 in the Convention on Nuclear Safety. And whereas closure may not be the end of the story for any nuclear facility, this is especially true for a waste disposal facility, whose primary function is performed after its closure. Disposal facilities for both radioactive and non-radioactive wastes require the contemplation of timescales far beyond those of concern in most other safety related fields.
The draft before you addresses spent fuel and radioactive waste from civilian applications, and spent fuel and radioactive waste from military or defence origins that has been transferred permanently to, and is being managed within, exclusively civilian programmes. The preamble to the convention makes clear, however, that the safety objectives espoused in the convention should also be adhered to in the management of military and defence wastes. The Joint Convention will not, as it is currently drafted, apply to spent fuel held at reprocessing facilities as part of a reprocessing activity, and it will not apply to most wastes containing only naturally occurring radionuclides, except for sealed sources or wastes originating from the nuclear fuel cycle.
The obligations embodied in the draft Convention are based in part on the principles contained in the IAEA document 'The Principles of Radioactive Waste Management' which represents an international consensus on the basic concepts underlying the safe management and disposal of waste, and on the legislative and regulatory framework needed to achieve it.
The draft Convention contains two parallel sets of requirements governing the safety of spent fuel management and of radioactive waste management, and also some requirements common to both. The common requirements include the establishment and maintenance of a legislative and regulatory framework for the safety of spent fuel and radioactive waste management, the provision of adequate financial and human resources for safety, and the implementation of adequate quality assurance, radiation protection and emergency preparedness programmes. Additional requirements are specified relating to the transboundary movement of spent fuel or radioactive waste and to the handling of disused sealed sources.
The draft Convention thus requires each Contracting Party to take appropriate national measures to assure the safety of spent fuel and radioactive waste management. It also requires them to report to the meeting of Contracting Parties on the measures taken. This peer review process, whereby the Contracting Parties meet to discuss national reports, is a key mechanism for promoting a high level of safety worldwide. It will be a process for subjecting the practices in all states parties to critical scrutiny. A by-product of this transparent process ought to be an increased acceptance of waste management practices and an increase in public confidence. There is a common misconception in the public that we do not know how to handle and dispose of radioactive waste with full responsibility vis a vis present and future generations. Dispelling this misconception is not stated as one of the main goals enunciated in Article 1 of this draft Convention. It should be a by-product.
The world has reached an important milestone in spent fuel and waste management. The fundamental safety principles have broad international agreement. The technology exists to act on them and it is being put into practice. Today we have reached the point where nations prepare to commit themselves as a matter of law to abide by a set of fundamental safety principles on spent fuel and radioactive waste management. We could only wish that other major industries of the world had acted similarly in their various fields.
The path to this Conference was not always easy. The fact that we are at the opening of a Diplomatic Conference owes much to the skill and stature of the Chairman of the group of Experts, Professor Alec Baer. I wish personally to thank him warmly. It also owes much to the many experts who conducted their debates throughout in a spirit of determination, compromise and co-operation. I trust that, even though some difficulties remain, the same mood and respect for strategic goals will prevail this week and will enable you to adopt a final text by the end of the week.