Quality assurance during construction, start-up and operation - Pre-OSART and OSART findings at nuclear power plants

With the 45 Pre-OSART and OSART missions carried out since the inception of the IAEA Operational Safety Review Team (OSART) programme, most of the countries building or operating nuclear power plants have now been visited. A variety of industrial traditions, managerial approaches, organizational structures and less important reactor types have been seen. Quality assurance has varied from almost none to an umbrella covering all activities of the operating organization. This, however, does not mean that equipment, performance and qualification standards have varied accordingly. On the contrary, it demonstrated that for optimum efficiency quality assurance needs to be tailored to the prevailing conditions in a country, utility or nuclear power plant. While almost all construction sites/nuclear power plants offer some good practices, they also offer room for improvement, and quality assurance facilitates verification not only that established goals are met but also that the new ones are adopted. The paper discusses what the OSART members reviewing quality assurance expect to find, what they typically encounter in their reviews and what proposals are made for possible improvement of this important managerial tool. (author)