The IRDP Program and the IAEA continued their long history of collaboration by sponsoring a joint workshop on the Fundamentals of Reactor Siting Safety, Environmental, and Emergency Planning for the Forum of Nuclear Regulatory Bodies in Africa (FRNBA). The workshop was hosted by the IAEA Headquarters in Vienna, Austria, from January 15 to January 19, 2018. The workshop was conducted by instructors from Advanced System Technology and Management (AdSTM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The AdSTM instructors were Richard Emch and Stewart Bland; Karim Ben Ouaghrem (IAEA's FNRBA coordinator), Shin Morita (External Events Safety Section), Mark Breitinger (Incident and Emergency Centre), and Marjan Tkavc (Incident and Emergency Centre) made presentations regarding IAEA standards and guidance.
The workshop was attended by 11 representatives from the regulatory authorities of six countries in the FNRBA - Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, Tunisia, and South Africa. The first four days of the workshop presented the USNRC's methodology for conducting the review of an application for an early site permit or a construction permit using the guidance of NUREG-0800 (the Standard Review Plan) and NUREG-1555 (the Environmental Standard Review Plan). The last day of the workshop focused on emergency planning presenting standards and guidance from the USNRC and IAEA. The workshop focused predominantly on siting safety and environmental requirements, including hydrology, earthquake potential and magnitude, and meteorology, as well as emergency planning and discussion on grid electrical power considerations. The workshop was very well received. Students were fully engaged in an interactive exercise where the participants were challenged to use the USNRC methodology to review the impact of flooding from an actual US early permit application.