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Although the NPT does not require its five nuclear-weapon States (NWS) parties to adopt safeguards agreements, the five States concerned (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US) have each concluded so-called voluntary offer safeguards agreements with the IAEA. Whilst these follow the basic structure of the standard model agreement they are based on fundamentally different safeguards undertakings which, in effect, recognise that the NWS continue to have nuclear activities outside the scope of IAEA safeguards and thus limit IAEA activities to all or part of the NWS’ civil nuclear activities.
In the case of the UK the basic safeguards undertaking in the tripartite UK/Euratom/IAEA safeguards agreement is the UK’s acceptance of the application of IAEA safeguards,
"On all source or special fissionable material in facilities or parts thereof within the United Kingdom, subject to exclusions for national security reasons only".
The UK provides the IAEA with a list of its civil nuclear facilities. Nuclear materials accountancy reports and basic design information for all these facilities is supplied to the IAEA via the European Commission and the IAEA is free to designate any of them for inspection. The UK retains the right however to remove facilities and/or withdraw material from the scope of the agreement for reasons of national security. Information on such withdrawals of nuclear material prior to February 2001 has been provided to Parliament.
The UK has also made a commitment to publish information each year on the amounts of Plutonium and Uranium held in civil locations.
The figures are also published by the IAEA as part of its Information Circular number 549. In future years the figures will be published on this website by HSE (UKSO).
As of December 2006, the UK facilities designated and inspected by the IAEA are:
Safety Assessment Principles for Nuclear Facilities
Nuclear site licence conditions
The use of computers in safety-critical applications
The licensing of nuclear
installations
The tolerability of risk from nuclear power stations
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