Technical Meeting on the Development of Strategies for Terminating Safeguards on Radioactive Waste

While planning for all radioactive waste within a state, all stakeholders must be consulted in a timely manner to ensure all needs are met. This process has institutionalized the needs of safety of the public and environment, operational safety, public engagement and consent, among others. One additional stakeholder that is not always incorporated into the process early enough is the discussion of safeguards obligations that may exist on waste materials. The incorporation and understanding of how safeguards obligations ca be applied to wastes needs to be fully understood by both waste management professionals and safeguards professionals.
The purpose of the event is to discuss and develop strategies Member States can implement to facilitate the disposal of wastes containing safeguarded nuclear materials. The event will explore the methods and preparations required to create waste forms that have a high likelihood of having the safeguards measures applied to them terminated.
The TM participants will meet to share experience on ways that they have incorporated safeguards concepts into their designs for waste and waste facilities, incorporated concepts relating to termination of safeguards per their State’s safeguards agreements, or how they have developed waste processes that could be adapted or have been adapted to make waste forms that may be eligible to have safeguards measures terminated. The meeting participants will also help to craft key messages to be incorporated into training materials to convey the need to incorporate safeguards concepts, especially termination concepts, at multiple levels (ministerial, facility, worker, etc.)
This Technical Meeting will:Present member state approaches to waste management that have or will incorporate concepts of termination:
• Craft and refine learning objectives for training modules covering the application of safeguards concepts to waste management processes and materials;• Discuss state level approaches to ensure that concepts of termination are appropriately incorporated early in the waste planning process as part of the Waste Acceptance Criteria process.