The new Basic Safety Standards Directive and its implications for environmental monitoring

Monitoring of levels of radioactivity in the environment is enshrined in Chapter 3 of the Euratom Treaty, in particular its Articles 35 and 36. These requirements in primary law have had an important impact on the importance of monitoring in Europe but have not been worked out in much detail in secondary legislation. The consolidation and revision of the Basic Safety Standards Directive was an opportunity for doing so. The requirements in Directive 96/29/Euratom had remained rather general. Now, more specific text is introduced on the establishment of discharge authorisations for radioactive effluents, and on monitoring these discharges. Requirements on estimation of public exposures and on environmental monitoring programmes have largely been copied from the old basic safety standards (BSS), however. The main novelty of the new BSS is the introduction of exposure situations, as defined by the ICRP in Publication 103 (2007). Environmental monitoring as part of the management of an emergency exposure situation is now addressed more clearly. As for existing exposure situations, indoor exposure to radon requires extensive surveys of indoor air or soil concentrations, and precise requirements are made on the management of residues from industries processing naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) as well as on the monitoring of building materials. Although the BSS do not address specific monitoring issues, studies have been undertaken on effluents from hospitals and on long-term management of uranium mining areas. The proposal for the new Basic Safety Standards Directive is examined in the light of experience of the accident at Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disabled by the terrible tsunami on 11 March 2011. The arrangements for information exchange in a normal situation and in an emergency exposure situation need to be looked at from this perspective as well as from the perspective of smaller incidents such as the release of 131I in Hungary in autumn 2011. Finally, an important novelty in the Euratom BSS is the inclusion of monitoring for the protection of non-human species in the environment, in line with ICRP Publications 103 and 108. These requirements are still under legal scrutiny in terms of the scope of the Euratom Treaty. The issue is very important also for the role of the Euratom legal framework in different EC policies, such as laid down in the Marine Waters Framework Directive or concluded under the OSPAR Convention (North-East Atlantic). -- Highlights: ► Euratom Treaty (1957) requires monitoring of environmental radioactivity in Europe. ► Continuous radioactivity monitoring is an important task in all EU Member States. ► EC verification missions review national monitoring arrangements and quality assurance. ► Maintaining monitoring capacity is needed for any nuclear incident or emergency. ► Nuclear facilities in normal operation cause only trivial exposure to the population