Reinforcement of planning and response to emergencies inside nuclear power plants

Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident (11th march of 2011) required a rapid and effective response of nuclear industry, in order to guarantee that current safety margins were enough to cope with events like this or even worse. In Europe, stress tests were carried out to comply with that objective, evaluating if every nuclear plant was able to succeed managing design basis accidents or even beyond. Stress-test results were satisfactory, although several areas for improvement where identified. Improvements in emergency response and management have been developed in several phases. First, increasing emergency response capacity by implementing modifications in existing equipment. Later, installing new equipment (generally portable) which would be used in even more degraded conditions. This must be held by the revision of emergency response personnel and their training. Finally, external support has been reinforced to help in longstanding emergencies, with the establishment of CAE (Regional Center), and collaboration protocols with the Army. These actions, supervised and approved by the Regulator Body (CSN) will lead to increase plants safety margins and their emergency response capacities in order to reduce probability and consequences of a nuclear accident to the minimum.