Following the Fukushima accident, additional assessment and management of consequences of beyond design basis events

In 2012, in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident, the IAEA reviewed transport of radioactive material activities. What emerged was that the accident did not justify any major changes to the “Regulations for the Safe Transport of Radioactive Material”: the lessons learned mainly concerned emergency preparedness.In 2013, the French competent authority called for a review of transport safety as regards low probability accidents with potentially significant consequences for persons or the environment. Package designers delved into the behaviour of packages when faced with events that are more severe than or that differ from the regulatory tests. Consignors assessed their organizational and material measures in place to cope with an emergency during transport.AREVA identified the casks of its own design associated with significant potential risk and analysed potential failure modes. This led to the definition of accident scenarios, which were applied to these cask designs. National and international existing studies, including AREVA’s studies, were reviewed and confirmed that present regulatory tests cover actual identified accident situations, but also potentially more severe situations. Additional studies would nonetheless be useful for refining or confirming some of the safety distances in the France’s emergency plans. AREVA has developed a specific organization to support authorities in the event of a transport accident. This is incorporated into AREVA’s general emergency management organization and is subject to regular drills. It is operational 24/7.Following the Fukushima accident, the AREVA national emergency response force, FINA, was created. It allows to better organize the deployment of the internal support services in the event of a major emergency at one of AREVA’s sites in France. FINA can provide support within 48 hours, with supplementary response personnel and equipment from other group’s entities. There is still work to define and prioritize specific missions that could be allocated to FINA for a major transport event. However, FINA already has access to significant skills and resources required to address transport events and could be used as additional support should a large scale transport accident occur. The paper details the assessment which was made (methodology and results) and provides information about the plan to cope with a large scale transport accident.