Centralized Monitoring Of Inspection Data In France For A Better Euratom Safeguards Implementation

Inspections carried out on nuclear facilities is an important part of the legal framework that structures the EURATOM safeguards implementation. Monitoring the proceedings and outcomes of these inspections gives valuable insights for a country’s authorities on the quality of safeguards implementation. For that reason, among its missions, IRSN (Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety), as technical support for CTE (Euratom Technical Committee, the French authorities’ representative for EURATOM), centralizes data on inspections carried out by EURATOM inspectors on French nuclear facilities. The effort of EURATOM inspections in France represents around a third of the overall inspection effort across European Union. This represents 300 inspections per year, mainly focused on the four principal French companies in the nuclear area (EDF, Framatome, Orano, CEA). Orano gathers more than half of the national inspection effort due to its various activities around the fuel cycle, especially enrichment in Tricastin and recycling in La Hague. For each inspection, information is collected either by IRSN agents who accompany most physical inventory verifications inspections, or by operators themselves. Typical data concerns duration, type, effort of inspection and difficulties encountered by inspectors or operators. IRSN also keeps track of the observations expressed by EURATOM in the letters received after the inspections and the solutions implemented by operators to respond to these observations. The obtained statistics can be presented at State level, and are also available at operator or even installation level. They also provide an overview of the operators’ involvement regarding their regulatory obligations. Besides, the analysis of such data delivers valuable information, which helps IRSN to better assist French operators in the search and implementation of solutions and to report to CTE the difficulties they may encounter. This paper presents how IRSN gathers data on EURATOM inspections, how statistics are produced and how the results are used to improve the quality of safeguards implementation in France.