The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management: development and technical content.

During the process of negotiation of the Convention on Nuclear Safety it was recognised that the safe management of radioactive waste was also a subject of great international concern. It was not possible to cover this subject comprehensively in a Convention focusing on the safety of civil nuclear power plants but the need for a further Convention was identified in the preamble to the Convention on Nuclear Safety. Accordingly the procedures were started that led to the setting-up of an open-ended Group of Experts to agree the text of a new Convention. This article describes from a scientific and technical viewpoint the deliberations of the Group of Experts, the compromises needed to cover in a single Convention the safety of both spent fuel management and radioactive waste management, the last minute expansion of the scope to admit reprocessing, the delicate negotiations on the inclusion of material from military programmes and the contentious question of the transboundary movement of spent fuel and radioactive waste. The article also summarises and provides some commentary on the final provisions of the Convention as adopted by a Diplomatic Conference in Vienna in September 1997 and now open for signature.