The IAEA Director General’s Report on the Fukushima Daiichi Accident,
along with five technical volumes on this topic by international
experts, have just been publicly released. This publication comes ahead
of the Agency’s General Conference in September.
The
report assesses the causes and consequences of the 11 March 2011
accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan,
triggered by a tsunami that followed a massive earthquake. It was the
worst emergency at a nuclear power plant since the Chernobyl disaster in
1986.
“The
report considers human, organizational and technical factors and aims
to provide an understanding of what happened, and why, so that the
necessary lessons learned can be acted upon by governments, regulators
and nuclear power plant operators throughout the world,” Mr Amano said
in his Foreword to the Report. “There can be no grounds for complacency
about nuclear safety in any country.”
The
report and the technical volumes distil and assemble lessons learned
from the accident and provide a knowledge base for the future. They
consider the accident itself, emergency preparedness and response,
radiological consequences of the accident, post-accident recovery and
the activities of the IAEA since the accident. Measures taken, both in
Japan and internationally, are examined. “Although nuclear safety
remains the responsibility of each individual country, nuclear accidents
can transcend national borders,” Mr Amano said in his foreword. “The
Fukushima Daiichi accident underlined the vital importance of effective
international cooperation. The IAEA is where most of that cooperation
takes place. Our Member States adopted the IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear
Safety a few months after the accident and have been implementing its
far reaching provisions to improve global nuclear safety.”
Mr
Amano had announced in 2012 that the IAEA would prepare an
authoritative, factual and balanced assessment of the accident,
addressing both its causes and consequences. The report is the result of
an extensive collaboration that involved some 180 experts from 42 IAEA
Member States and several international bodies.
The report and the technical volumes are accessible here. A brochure summarizing the main findings is available here.
The Director General’s Report in Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish is available here.
The Chinese translation will be available later this week. The
unofficial Japanese translation of the Foreword and the Executive
summary of the Director General’s Report are available here. The full translation will be published in September.
Related resources
The Fukushima Daiichi Accident Report by the Director General and Technical Volumes
In Focus: Fukushima Nuclear Accident
In Focus: IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety
