Technical Synergies between Nuclear Safety and Security

One year after the Fukushima event, the nuclear security summit in Seoul March 2012, in its final statement, highlights the nexus between safety and security. The safety of operations making use of nuclear or radioactive materials aims at the protection of health and minimization of danger to life and property. Nuclear security aims to prevent and, otherwise, detect and respond to theft, sabotage, unauthorized access, illegal transfer or other malicious acts involving nuclear material, other radioactive substances or their associated facilities. One evident common goal of safety and security is to avoid any contact between the radioactivity and public/environment by accident or incidentally. Synergies between nuclear safety and security at technical level, both for new and existing installations, are therefore possible, at least, in three areas. First, the technologies and design architecture used to ensure nuclear safety can and are also used to ensure security by prevention or mitigation of the consequences from malevolent acts. Second, the techniques and methods developed to ensure protection against ionizing radiation are applicable both to nuclear safety and nuclear security concerns. The third area where synergy between safety and security is evident is the emergency preparedness and response when similar effective procedures need to be in place irrespectively from the origin of the emergency. The synergy between nuclear safety and security could be sought in two ways – either by identifying/ designing common elements serving both safety and security needs or by adapting available safety technologies to serve security purposes and vise versa. While the first approach is usually applied for new designs, the second one can be applied at all stages of an installation's life time. The Joint Research Centre of the European Commission is leading an important part of the R&D Euratom Program where safety, security, safeguards and non-proliferation are core areas. JRC has recently demonstrated at a technical level the synergies between safeguards and security and their possible integration allowing better optimization of the resources and important benefit from exchange of experience and expertise between the two systems. In this paper, the focus will be on the technical synergies between safety and security giving some technical examples on the three selected relevant areas.