Highlights and Comments from a Regulator's Workshop

Mikael Jensen (SSI, Sweden) presented the feedback of the regulatory workshop that took place in Sweden in September 2001, titled 'The Role of Future Society and Biosphere in Demonstrating Compliance with High-level Radioactive Waste Disposal Standards and Regulations'. The theme included questions such as how to meet regulatory compliance with an evolving biosphere and how will regulators judge compliance? During the Workshop, presentations were made from international regulatory aspects such as IAEA or ICRP. There were also very interesting country-by-country presentation such as the Finnish presentation by STUK which specifies limits on radionuclide releases from a repository after a thousand years or so. There appears to be a consensus on the relevance developing initiatives on the sustainable development, the protection of the environment and addressing long time scales. One technical aspects, the geosphere/biosphere interface, was viewed as a key issue for future study and analysis