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The Advance Reference Material (ARM) submitted

2015.04.28

On the initiative of Hungary a review about the entire national nuclear regulatory infrastructure for safety and security will be conducted by international experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the framework of an Integrated Regulatory Review Service Mission (IRRS) in May, 2015. The Hungarian Atomic Energy Authority (HAEA) preparing for the review submitted an advance information package to the IAEA in the first week of April, 2015. On this occasion Dániel Nyisztor, the project manager of the IRRS was interviewed about the relevance of the IRRS Project, the tasks already fulfilled and the challenges still ahead.


Submitting the ARM is one of the milestones of the preparatory work for the Mission. What does it mean exactly, and why is it so significant?

The Advance Reference Material (ARM) is an information package that contains the results of the self-evaluation of the national regulatory system, the Action Plan based on the self-evaluation together with, the description of the national legislative background and the administrative system of competent governmental bodies. All this information was submitted to the IAEA in English so that the foreign experts of the Mission could study it in advance and arrive to Hungary for the two week Mission prepared.

I suppose it was a great challenge to elaborate these documents in English.

The 450 pages of the ARM are the summary of our answers to four thousand questions. It was set out in Hungarian, the National Public Health and Medical Officer Service and the competent Regional Authority for Environmental and Nature Protection took part in the work beside the HAEA. The translation was prepared by an official translator revised by the experts of the Authority. Since time was short, this revision also meant a challenge for us.

Do you mean we are ready for the Mission in May, or there are still some more tasks in connection with the preparatory work?

We cannot afford to stop working: there are plenty of organisational questions ahead. The elaboration of the detailed programme of the Mission is still in progress, and at the end of April there will be a preparation course for the Hungarian participants of the review.

Back to the ARM, could you give us a brief summary of this 450 page document? Does a short summary exist, which you can tell us about?

There is no shortened version, the ARM itself is the summarized material. However, it has an executive summary, which contains a brief version of the SWOT analysis (detection of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) of different areas studied during the self-evaluation.
This is the simplified result of the self-evaluation, which cannot be used in itself, but contains the main points.

What strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the analysis would you highlight?  

As you can read in the ARM, one of the strengths of the Hungarian administrative and legislative system is that it is well-elaborated and stable. However, in the field of supervision and control competences of the authorities we have noticed possibilities of further improvements that also became part of the Action Plan.





The Action Plan puts emphasis on knowledge management and education. The major part of the conclusions and plans of the studied areas actually refer to them. Based on the results of the evaluation, the present system of education within the regulatory body shall be systematically improved, and functions belonging to knowledge management will be treated in a coherent way in the future. The basis for these measures will be set up yet this year.

Besides, several decisions have been made to improve the regulatory process, the documentary system and the inspection practice. These are all included in the Action Plan.

What will be the next big step in the IRRS process?

Since transparency is of special importance to the HAEA, I find it essential that the public should continuously be informed about the Mission. Information will be published about the preparation course at the end of April, and active communication is planned during and about the two weeks of the Mission. It is important that the result of the review and the summary report will be made public. Following the closing session, a press conference will be delivered by the Leader of the Mission about their experiences.

Previous press release referring to IRRS can be found here. The interview was made by Gábor Körmendi, communication officer of the HAEA.



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