The NEA incident reporting system

The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Incident Reporting System (IRS) was established in 1980 in order to exchange operating experience gained in thermal nuclear power plants and to facilitate proper feedback of this experience to benefit nuclear regulatory authorities, utilities and manufacturers as well as to provide additional guidance for safety research programmes. The purpose of the system is to collect and disseminate sufficiently detailed information on incidents of safety significance in nuclear power plants, as soon as practicable, and feed back appropriate conclusions from such incidents. The exchange of information, in the form of reports, is supplemented by a database storage system designed to facilitate the process of identifying relevant reported incidents for specific studies. The NEA-IRS is an efficient and effective way of collecting and distributing information about operational experience of nuclear power plants on an international scale. (author)