Location: Vienna International Centre
Every four years, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) Department of Safeguards organizes a safeguards symposium. These symposia provide an important forum for interaction between the IAEA and its Member States on a wide variety of international safeguards and non-proliferation issues. The previous such event, the Symposium on International Safeguards: Preparing for Future Verification Challenges, was held in Vienna, Austria, from 1 to 5 November 2010. The 2014 Safeguards Symposium will address safeguards during a time of change. The nuclear landscape is evolving, and this presents the IAEA and its Member States with both challenges and opportunities. Developments continue to challenge the nuclear non-proliferation regime and have increased general expectations of what IAEA safeguards are meant to achieve. Te importance placed on the credible assurances of the peaceful use of nuclear energy provided through the IAEA’s safeguards conclusions is likely to increase.
The IAEA needs to continue addressing challenges such as the global expansion of nuclear activities, covert nuclear technology supply networks, the greater availability of proliferation sensitive information through new media, and the need to safeguard new, more advanced and larger scale nuclear fuel cycle facilities. All this is likely to significantly increase the workload of the IAEA’s Department of Safeguards. The IAEA must also take advantage of new opportunities, particularly in the fields of information technologies, improved verification capabilities and proliferation resistant technologies. In addition, the IAEA faces its own organizational challenges. Further opportunities for achieving both improved safeguards implementation and organizational effectiveness and efficiency must be realized as financial resources are not rising in proportion to the workload. All these issues highlight the evolving nature of the IAEA’s operating environment and the importance of adapting to ensure that safeguards remain effective and are implemented as efficiently as possible.
The purpose of the symposium is to foster constructive dialogue and information exchange between the IAEA Secretariat, IAEA Member States, nuclear industry representatives and technical experts (in particular, those involved in nuclear non-proliferation matters), with a view to exploring jointly the strategic issues faced by the IAEA and to discussing the implementation of possible solutions by the safeguards community as a whole.
