Many of the questions we get asked by the public are about how well prepared the nuclear industry is to deal with natural or man-made disasters or climate change.
Clearly, licensees have no control over earthquakes, plane crashes or sea level rises, but it’s part of our remit to make sure they have measures in place should these events occur.
To that end, we’ve updated our External Hazards Technical Assessment Guide (TAG 13), a detailed document that covers seismic events, coastal flooding, meteorological hazards, and more.
TAG 13 consolidates lessons learned from the events at Fukushima in 2011 and was a collaboration with other regulators, licensees and technical consultants.
Our Professional Lead for External Hazards, Tim Allmark, says, “We’ve reaped some real rewards, with over 700 comments from stakeholders, which helped us to improve the document.”
We’ll be going back to licensees in a year’s time to ask how they’re finding the TAG and we’ll be asking our own inspectors for feedback so we can look to make further improvements.