Quality Assurance in Safeguards: Indonesian Document Control and Records Management System

As a country develops its nuclear power program (NPP), that country should assess its current quality assurance (QA) program. In the past, QA was interpreted as regulations and audits with little thought to integrating the quality process into the overall management of the NPP. Every organization has performance objectives it strives to achieve by way of implementing processes. The lack of quality process integration has caused concern with safety and safeguards. The challenges of developing and managing an NPP require improvement to the traditional QA program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recognized the need for improvement by gathering information from current Member States and, through its own extensive experience, developing a new QA culture that looks at the safety, reliability, and performance of the organization. This improvement resulted in revision and enhancement to the existing QA code and related safety guides, to portray modern processes and techniques for achieving and managing QA. In addition, the IAEA is developing guidance documents on nuclear knowledge management (KM) including knowledge preservation and knowledge transfer in the nuclear sector. Examples of existing KM activities for operation of an NPP include: configuration management, document control, work control systems, QA and quality management, and corrective action systems. This paper concentrates on the aspect of document control that includes records management, with examples of the joint activity currently going on at the Nuclear Regulatory Agency of the Republic of Indonesia under security and safeguards arrangement with the U.S. Department of Energy.