Intense discussions and sharing lessons learned as well as
innovative ideas were the hallmarks of the ninth International Experts
Meeting (IEM) which focused on assessment and prognosis in response to a
nuclear or radiological emergency. Two hundred experts from 70
countries and five international organizations spent 20 to 24 April
sharing best practice examples from different Member States regarding
how assessment and prognosis can contribute to building confidence and
trust during nuclear and radiological emergencies.
They also focused on what might be the most important aspect in this
context: How to coordinate these efforts at an international level.
Trust and Verify
Assessment and prognosis are important in building and maintaining
public and stakeholder confidence in the actions and decision-making of
those who are handling the emergency.
“You build confidence when you take mitigation actions during an
emergency and you can back up those actions with scientific findings and
assessment, and you can confirm that these actions were justified by
using radiation measurements,” said Lynn Hubbard of Sweden’s Radiation
Safety Authority.
Building public trust is part of emergency preparedness and should
begin well in advance of an accident. Brian Ahier, Director of the
Radiation Protection Bureau within Health Canada, said, “There are many
ways of building confidence and part of that is being open and
transparent and communicating with the public and stakeholders during
the non-emergency preparedness phase. One way of doing that is providing
information on what the emergency planning arrangements are, what
capabilities and expertise you have in place, and consistently providing
environmental monitoring data.”
Ahier also noted that building and maintaining public and stakeholder
trust involve harmonised communication, with power plant operators,
local, provincial, state, national and international authorities saying
the same thing.
Speaking With One Voice
During his keynote address to the IEM, Head of the IAEA Department of
Nuclear Safety and Security, Deputy Director General Denis Flory, said
of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, “From an international
perspective, it was clear, that many different messages were reaching
the public on the development of the accident, and how the situation
might evolve in the coming weeks and months after the accident. At the
same time, there was no clear mechanism to provide a harmonized message
to the global community. This absence of a harmonised message created
some confusion in the public, even though most of the situation
assessments were fundamentally very similar.”
Hubbard, who is also Chair of the
Emergency Preparedness and Response Expert Group,
which advises the IAEA Secretariat, said this is also one of her
greatest concerns with regard to assessment and prognosis. “It was
confusing during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident as
many countries came out with their own information and it makes the life
of the accident country much more difficult. You can easily lose the
confidence of the public if there are too many conflicting expert
opinions from around the world coming in to the media with their own
assessments.”
Member States have asked the IAEA to provide timely, clear, factually
correct, objective and easily understandable information on each
emergency’s potential consequences and prognosis of possible scenarios,
without duplicating or replacing, but rather supporting, the Member
States’ role in emergency response.
“No doubt, there is a lot of work to be done to achieve such a
delicate balance, but that’s why IEM 9 is so important,” said Hubbard.
One reason coordination is so difficult is the many different
criteria countries and organizations use to arrive at assessments and
accident prognoses. “There’s definitely a role for the IAEA to
facilitate harmonised communication, and I hope that what we get out of
IEM 9 this week will inform the next steps that the IAEA will take in
this regard,” said Ahier. “I think there’s a lot of interest out there
to see this move forward. Still, there are also a lot of questions and I
think it’s great that the IAEA is convening these types of meetings to
gather the expertise globally and to work collectively on a solution for
resolving these challenging issues.”
The next opportunity to discuss the challenges emergency planners and
responders face and the strategies to successfully tackle them will be
19-23 October 2015 when the IAEA hosts the International Conference on
Global Emergency Preparedness and Response.
Learn more about it.
