The FRAREG (FRAmatome REGulators) association was created in May 2000 at the inaugural meeting held in Cape Town at the invitation of the South African nuclear safety authority. It comprises the nuclear safety authorities of Belgium, France, the People's Republic of China, South Africa and South Korea.

Its mandate is to facilitate transfer of experience gained from supervision of the reactors designed and/or built by the same supplier and to enable the nuclear safety authorities to compare the methods they use to handle generic problems and evaluate the level of safety of the Framatome type reactors they supervise.

The 4th meeting was held in Taejon, South Korea on 21 and 22 June. This meeting was organised by the Korean Institute for Nuclear Safety (KINS), which is the technical support organisation for the Korean safety authority (Ministry Of Science and Technology - MOST). The debates in particular covered incident analysis and probabilistic safety studies. The Chinese nuclear safety authority was unable to take part in this meeting.

One way for improving knowledge of the actual workings of foreign nuclear safety and radiation protection authorities (and learn lessons for operation of the ASN) is to develop the system of staff exchanges.

The nuclear safety and radiation protection authorities concerned so far have been those of Belgium, Canada, Germany, Japan, People's Republic of China, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States.

Provision is made for several types of exchange:

– very short-term actions (one to two days) offering our counterparts cross-inspections and joint emergency exercises: they involve inviting foreign inspectors to take part in inspections or emergency exercises performed by inspectors from the country concerned.
In Germany for instance, joint inspections were organised in the hospital sector. The DSNRs of Orleans and Douai also maintain regular contacts with the nuclear installations inspectorate of the Lower Saxony region. A visit by three ASN inspectors was organised from 16 to 19 August 2005 to the KKU reactor operated by E.ON in Lower Saxony. The French inspectors collected information on the supervision procedures employed by the Lower Saxony safety authority and the fire protection and staff radiation protection measures implemented by the operator.
A team of Spanish radiation protection inspectors came to France from 14 to 17 June 2005 to visit the nuclear medicine, brachytherapy and radiotherapy departments at the Institut Bergonié Centre Régional de Lutte Contre Le Cancer (CRLCC) cancer unit in Bordeaux. In Spain, ASN teams took part in a radiation protection inspection in the Asco plant (19 to 21 October 2005), as well as an inspection of a research laboratory equipped with a cyclotron and an inspection of a gammagraphy installation on a worksite (Madrid, from 16 to 18 November).
In the United Kingdom, an ASN team comprising DSNR inspectors from Douai and Châlons-en-Champagne, took part in an inspection from 12 to 13 April 2005 of the Sizewell B site (1200 MWe, 4-loop pressurised water reactor), enabling them to observe the practices of their British colleagues during a unit outage and how the site operator manages contractors working on the site. Joint inspections were also carried out in the spent fuel reprocessing plants at La Hague and Sellafield.
Joint industrial radiology inspections were organised with our Swiss and British counterparts.

In the United States, three ASN inspectors took part in a training course given for radiation protection inspectors by the NRC from 21 to 31 March 2005. This course was an opportunity to compare French regulatory requirements and training reference systems with those in use in the United States.

- short-term assignments (3 weeks to 3 months), aimed at studying a specific technical topic.
There were no missions of this type in 2005;

- long-term exchanges (up to 3 years) in order to take part in the working of the foreign nuclear safety and radiation protection authority to gain an in-depth knowledge of it.