Long-term stewardship (LTS) is the work of carrying responsibility for radioactive waste beyond the operating life of a facility and beyond the lifetime of the organizations in charge of it. Several activities are linked: understanding the safety status of the waste and the disposal facility, preserving the relevant records, securing the necessary funding, and passing on the knowledge that future custodians will need to make their own judgements. Closing a disposal facility does not end the responsibility to explain the characteristics and location of the waste, the functions of the barriers, and the basis for the safety conclusions.
WIA-ENE-026 v1.0 defines waste package, facility, monitoring and traceability information, and this information serves as the foundation for long-term management. The standard does not define a dedicated long-term stewardship record, an enumeration of institutional control phases, or an export API for long-term preservation. The preservation, financing and responsibility transfer practices described in this chapter are ways of using the information the standard defines; they do not introduce new WIA fields or conformance requirements.
Institutional control refers to the managerial, administrative and informational measures applied to a disposal facility and its site. Active institutional control includes measures that require continuing activity, such as monitoring, inspection, maintenance and access control. Passive institutional control includes measures that convey the nature of the site through records and markers. For land use restrictions, both their legal force and the responsibility for enforcing them need to be confirmed.
The duration of these measures and the points at which one gives way to another differ from facility to facility, and different measures may be applied concurrently. Management periods and transition conditions are determined by the characteristics of the waste, the disposal method, the site conditions, the safety assessment and the applicable licence conditions. Records and markers may also be maintained while monitoring continues.
The storage period, the period of post-closure institutional control, the timeframe of the safety assessment and the records retention period are distinct concepts. In WIA-ENE-026 v1.0, the planned, maximum and unit values under storage.storageDuration describe the storage period. The post-closure management period and the time at which records may be disposed of are determined separately from these values. When calculating a post-closure period, the starting point specified in the applicable documents is confirmed; the start of facility operation is not used as a substitute for the date of closure.
Passive safety refers to safety functions that do not depend on continuing active intervention. In a disposal facility, engineered barriers such as the waste form, container, buffer and backfill, and natural barriers such as the host rock and the surrounding geological environment, share these functions in ways that depend on the disposal concept. The contributions of both engineered and natural barriers are also taken into account when assessing situations in which institutional control weakens.
The long-term performance of the barriers is assessed by considering together the evolution of materials, interaction with groundwater, the release and migration of radionuclides, and possible changes at the site. Records and markers help to reduce inadvertent human intrusion through unintended use of the site, but they do not substitute for the isolation performance of the disposal system. Monitoring results are likewise data for the period and conditions observed, and do not by themselves demonstrate long-term safety as a whole.
The safety case links these assessment results with the design basis, quality management records, uncertainty and review findings. Long-term stewardship records should capture not only the final conclusions but also the conditions under which those conclusions hold. The end of management is not determined from radionuclide half-lives alone, and the effects of decay products and of barrier and environmental conditions on the judgement are distinguished.
In long-term management, the links between records matter more than the presence of individual fields. It must be possible to trace which waste package was held in which facility, the date to which an activity value refers, which treatment and inspections the package underwent, and which data support the current judgement.
| Purpose of the data | Items defined by the standard | What to check for long-term management |
|---|---|---|
| Identification | packageId, facilityId, wasteClass |
Link waste packages to facilities, and confirm the classification scheme and document version applied. |
| Interpreting radiological information | radiologicalData.totalActivity.referenceDate, radiologicalData.isotopes, radiologicalData.uncertainties |
Confirm the reference date, radionuclide composition, units and uncertainty. Distinguish the sources of measured and calculated values. |
| Understanding the condition of the waste and container | containerInfo, physicalProperties, processing.qualityControl |
Preserve the evidence for the container, waste form and processing quality. This information alone does not guarantee long-term barrier performance. |
| Tracing location and chain of custody (hand-over and acceptance records) | storage.storageLocation, traceability.chainOfCustody |
Reconcile the current location with movement and hand-over events. Confirm the final disposal location and any transfer of responsibility between organizations against separate supporting documents. |
| Understanding the facility and its barriers | location.geology, engineeredBarriers and monitoringSystems in the facility information |
Link geological conditions, barrier purposes and the monitoring arrangements to design, as-built and assessment records. |
| Confirming the disposal plan | regulatory.disposalPlan |
Confirm the planned date, method, location and whether funding has been allocated. Distinguish the plan from what has actually been carried out. |
plannedDisposalDate is the planned disposal date. It is not to be read as the date on which disposal was completed or closure was approved. Likewise, fundingAllocated indicates whether funding has been allocated; it is not evidence that long-term management costs are adequately covered or that the funds can actually be disbursed.
The package timestamp, the activity referenceDate and the timestamp in the chain of custody records also need to be kept apart. A record being the most recent does not mean that every value in it was measured at the same time. Before summing inventories or comparing different reports, align the time basis and calculation method of each value.
The facility operationalStatus takes three values, active, under_construction and decommissioning, representing operation, construction and decommissioning. Completed closure and the post-closure institutional control phase are managed separately from these values, so decommissioning is not to be read as representing either of them; the required approval and hand-over documents are linked in a separate records management system using the facility identifier.
For the relationship between the classification codes in §2.1 of the standard (such as LLW-1) and those in PHASE-1 (Foundation & Classification) (such as LLW-A), see the Standard Reading Notes in Chapter 1. Long-term preservation records should retain which of the two schemes was applied, together with the document and its version; where a classification has to be converted, record the basis for the decision and the values before and after conversion.
The names of data items should also be distinguished from their physical meaning. The engineeredBarriers array in the facility information also contains a host_rock entry, yet host rock is physically a natural barrier. When describing safety functions, divide engineered and natural barriers by the physical nature of each barrier rather than by its position in the array. Long-term preservation records should keep both the description of the data structure and the description of how the actual facility functions.
Records preservation involves both keeping the files and keeping their meaning understandable. Waste inventories need units and activity reference dates; location information needs a coordinate system and drawing references. Barrier designs need to be linked with the as-built condition and their change history, and safety assessments with their input data, assumptions, uncertainty and approved versions.
Knowledge transfer extends to passing on how these records are to be interpreted. If successors must rely on software that is no longer in use or on internal abbreviations of an organization that no longer exists, the content may be difficult to reconstruct even though the files survive. Preserving data dictionaries, format descriptions, calculation methods, drawing legends and the reasons for key decisions alongside the records keeps interpretation continuous even as responsible organizations and technical environments change.
The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model of ISO 14721 describes the roles involved in ingesting digital information, preserving it and making it available to users. The definitions in this section are cited from CCSDS 650.0-M-2 (2012), which is technically identical to ISO 14721:2012. The current editions are ISO 14721:2025, published in March 2025, and CCSDS 650.0-M-3 (2024); ISO 14721:2012 has been withdrawn. OAIS information packages are distinguished by their role, according to where the information is being passed from and to.
An Archival Information Unit (AIU) is an AIP for which the archive chooses not to break down the content information into other AIPs; it holds a single content information object (which may consist of multiple files) described by exactly one set of PDI. An Archival Information Collection (AIC) is an AIP whose content information is an aggregation of other AIPs, each of which has its own PDI, and the AIC also has its own PDI describing the collection criteria and process. Both are concepts for distinguishing forms of AIP, so neither is used as a retention period code. Whether an archive is certified, and what its preservation capability is, are confirmed from that archive's own assessment and certification records.
A multi-media strategy guards against different causes of loss. Options to consider include storing digital data at geographically separate locations and keeping key explanations and drawings in a form that people can read directly. Even when paper, microfilm, stone or ceramics are used, lifetime depends on the material, the quality of manufacture, the storage environment and the conditions of damage. The name of a medium alone cannot guarantee any fixed service life.
Digital preservation must deal both with damage to storage devices and with the obsolescence of file formats and the tools needed to interpret them. When carrying out format migration, preserve the original, the migration history and the rules used, and confirm that numerical values, units, characters and drawing information are retained. Integrity check values are useful for confirming whether a file has changed, but they do not prove that the values originally entered were correct or that the content remains understandable.
The standard's security requirement to retain audit logs for 10 years is covered in Section 4.8.1. The IoT monitoring configuration example in §7.2 of the standard includes 10 years as the retention value. The first 10 years is a security requirement on the retention period of audit logs; the second, 10 years, sits in the data management (dataManagement) block of the monitoring configuration example and illustrates a retention setting for monitoring data. The requirement and the example setting are therefore kept distinct. Retention periods for disposal inventories, as-built drawings and safety assessment records, and the authority to dispose of them, are set separately according to the function of the records and the requirements that apply.
Long-term markers are a means of signalling that a hazard exists and of enabling detailed records to be located. Short warning messages, maps describing the location and specialist facility records each provide information for a different audience. It is not assumed that the meaning of language and images will remain unchanged over long periods; the links between markers and records are checked, and explanatory material is updated.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in the United States is the facility that the PHASE-1 document cites as an example of special disposal for transuranic waste. According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), WIPP is located 26 miles (about 42 km) southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and permanently isolates defense-generated transuranic (TRU) waste 2,150 feet (about 655 m) underground in an ancient salt formation. Disposal began in 1999. When long-term warning designs are used as examples, distinguish whether each element has been proposed, approved, installed or maintained, and confirm the evidence for each.
Public explanations and detailed management records may require different levels of access. Public versions should be written so that the nature of the site and its management status can be understood, while access to detailed material that requires security or privacy protection is controlled. Recording which management copy and version each public version is based on maintains both public disclosure and the traceability of the records.
Financial assurance is the arrangement that ensures funds can be used for the necessary management activities. The first step is to distinguish the scope of costs for decommissioning, interim storage, transport, disposal, closure and post-closure management. When costs from different projects are summed, check that the same activity has not been counted more than once.
| Item | Meaning | Treatment in an adequacy assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Provision | The amount at which a future obligation is recognized in the accounts. | Not added as cash or as a separate source of funds. Confirm the scope of the obligation and the measurement assumptions. |
| Current accumulated assets or fund assets | Assets that exist at the date of assessment. | Confirm their value, restrictions on use, withdrawal rights and actual availability. |
| Future levies and contributions | Funding expected or committed to come in at a later date. | Keep separate from current assets, and state the basis, timing and potential variability of payment. |
| Future cost estimates | Expected expenditure based on a defined scope of work and set of assumptions. | The figure against which funding is compared; not added to secured funds. |
Presenting provisions, fund assets, future contributions and expected costs added together as available funding misrepresents the financial position. Present the current funding position separately from the outlook that includes future income, and reconcile the figures so that the same assets, levies or investment returns are not reflected in more than one item.
Accumulation during the operating period, segregated funds or trusts, and guarantees can be considered as ways of providing funding. The effectiveness of each depends on ownership of the funds, the conditions for withdrawal, the scope of the guarantee, the ability to pay, and the succession arrangements if the managing organization changes. Which combination a given country has adopted can be judged only from the source documents for that country's arrangements.
When comparing costs with funding, align the reference date, price basis, inflation and investment return assumptions, discounting method and timing of expenditure. Because costs far in the future are sensitive to assumptions, present not only a single figure but also how changes in the key assumptions affect the result. Discounting used in economic evaluation is not a basis for narrowing the scope of safety obligations.
Cost per reactor unit, per drum and per unit volume are different bases of comparison. Where waste types and processing states, container specifications, facility scale or the work included differ, unit costs alone are a poor basis for comparing efficiency or funding adequacy. Before applying a unit cost to another facility or country, first align the charging unit and the cost scope.
regulatory.disposalPlan.fundingAllocated in WIA-ENE-026 does not replace this review. The status of financial assurance can be explained only when the funding allocation flag is linked to cost estimates, asset statements, the basis for contributions, spending authority and review findings.
Long-term management distinguishes the responsibility for managing the facility, the responsibility for keeping the records, the authority to spend funds, and the role of reviewing and approving safety judgements. Even where one organization holds several of these roles, the basis and succession conditions for each role are recorded. Names and contact details of responsible staff are not enough to carry responsibility forward after a reorganization or the dissolution of an organization.
Transfer records should cover the facilities and waste packages concerned, the transfer reference date, the list and versions of approved records, the management tasks remaining, open issues, and the conditions for transferring funding and access rights. The receiving organization confirms separately that it has received the material and that it is able to carry out the management tasks. The event history in traceability.chainOfCustody is foundational data for tracing this, but it does not automatically guarantee the legal effect of a transfer of responsibility between organizations or the long-term preservation of the records.
Intergenerational equity is the principle that future generations should not bear undue burdens from waste generated by the present generation. To that end, the present generation carries out the safety measures and secures the funding that are currently possible, discloses openly the uncertainties and remaining issues, and passes on the information that later generations will need to make their own decisions. Recording the remaining obligations clearly matters more than declaring that every burden has been removed.
When considering keeping options open for the future, the cost and management burden needed to maintain those options are assessed as well. Retrievability is a design issue to be examined in terms of the disposal concept, its safety implications, and the equipment and maintenance conditions it requires. Ethical principles alone do not determine a particular reprocessing policy or the timing of a decision.
Questions from residents and stakeholders, the alternatives considered, the reasons for the choices made, and remaining disagreements complement the technical records. Such records help successors understand the background to earlier decisions and judge what needs to be reconsidered when new information emerges.
In applying this approach in Korea, the data for the low- and intermediate-level waste disposal facility and for spent nuclear fuel management projects are kept separate. The licensed scope, capacity units, closure conditions or cost structure of one facility are not carried over unchanged to a different type of project. Korean facility names, locations, licence numbers and capacities that appear in the WIA-ENE-026 v1.0 data examples are illustrative values that show the data format.
Statutory obligations, administrative plans, facility-specific licence conditions and the WIA data specification are each interpreted on their own basis. The allocation of responsibilities under statutory provisions, siting criteria, project schedules and post-closure management periods are confirmed against the current versions of the relevant legislation and administrative plans. National application records should state the version and scope of effect of the documents actually applied, and the basis for the judgements made for the facility concerned.
IAEA SSR-5, Disposal of Radioactive Waste (2011), establishes safety requirements that apply to disposal facilities for all types of radioactive waste. SSG-23, The Safety Case and Safety Assessment for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste (2012), is a safety guide on the safety case for disposal facilities and the safety assessment that supports it. The institutional control period for an individual facility is set, on the basis of these documents, in that facility's safety assessment and licence conditions.
GSR Part 6, Decommissioning of Facilities (2014), establishes requirements for the financing, planning and conduct of facility decommissioning. Because decommissioning a facility and post-closure management of a disposal facility differ in scope, confirm how the requirements to be applied relate to the activity concerned. ISO 14721 is a reference model for information preservation; it does not replace disposal safety standards or the licence conditions of an individual facility.
Through its initiative on the Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory across Generations (RK&M), the OECD/NEA examined ways of passing on information about disposal facilities over long periods. One of its reports addresses how to develop a Key Information File for a repository and can be used as a reference when compiling the list of transfer records.
The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management provides a framework for peer review through national reports by the Contracting Parties and review meetings. Facility data used in reporting should allow their source, reference date, inventory aggregation scope and classification criteria to be confirmed.
NEWMDB (Net Enabled Waste Management Database) was a database operated by the IAEA to collect information on Member States' radioactive waste management programmes, legislation and inventories; it has since been replaced by the Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Information System (SRIS). A focal point for international data exchange is the organization or person who coordinates the review and submission of data.
When aggregating facility-level data into national-level data, distinguish waste in storage from waste already disposed of, volumes before and after processing, and the reference dates for activity. Preserving the aggregation rules and conversion history makes it possible to explain differences between reports. The WIA-ENE-026 v1.0 API covers the exchange of facility, waste package and monitoring data; the procedures for submitting international reports and the responsibility for approving them are set by each country's reporting arrangements.
The query API defined in §10 of the standard can be used to gather the data to be transferred. The full list of API endpoints is covered in Section 2.8. The following example queries facility information, the facility inventory, an individual waste package, and monitoring data for a specified period. The identifiers and dates are example values from the body of the standard and do not represent the status or management schedule of any actual facility.
GET /facilities/FAC-STORE-KR-001
GET /facilities/FAC-STORE-KR-001/inventory
GET /packages/RW-2025-KR-00001234
GET /monitoring/readings?packageId=RW-2025-KR-00001234&startTime=2025-12-01T00:00:00Z&endTime=2025-12-25T23:59:59ZFacility query results are used to describe the site, barriers and monitoring arrangements. Inventory query results are the starting point for compiling the list of waste packages to be transferred. Individual package queries link location, activity reference date and the processing and chain of custody history, while monitoring queries capture data for the observation period. When interpreting measured values, also check sensor identification and calibration records.
Do not assume that all query results represent the state at the same point in time. Because the inventory can change while queries are running, record the transfer reference date and the time of data extraction, and reconcile movements in progress and pending corrections. Preserve the results extracted on the transfer reference date as they are, so that the inventory at that past point in time can be checked again.
The location update endpoint, PUT /packages/{packageId}/location, changes the storage location of a waste package. Confirm how the history associated with a location change is actually recorded. Similarly, the decay calculation in POST /dose/decay is to be distinguished from a disposal facility safety assessment, which also covers barrier degradation and radionuclide migration.
The following procedure is an example of transfer work that uses WIA-ENE-026 v1.0 information; it is an operational practice separate from the conformance requirements of the standard.
Implementation checks compare the fields, values and query conditions stated in the documentation with actual behaviour. Functions outside the scope defined by the standard are marked as a separate verification scope. A successful query alone cannot be taken to show that long-term records preservation, financial assurance or the legal transfer of responsibility has been achieved, and self-assessment results are not presented as formal conformance certification.
The success of long-term stewardship depends on whether future custodians can confirm the location and characteristics of the waste, understand the basis for the safety judgements, and carry out the tasks that remain. What the present generation needs to leave behind is a facility with working safety functions, together with records that explain those functions, funding that can be used, and institutions that can carry responsibility forward.
fundingAllocated alone.| Source | Address |
|---|---|
| IAEA SSR-5, Disposal of Radioactive Waste (2011) | https://www.iaea.org/publications/8420/disposal-of-radioactive-waste |
| IAEA SSG-23, The Safety Case and Safety Assessment for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste (2012) | https://www.iaea.org/publications/8790/the-safety-case-and-safety-assessment-for-the-disposal-of-radioactive-waste |
| IAEA GSR Part 6, Decommissioning of Facilities (2014) | https://www.iaea.org/publications/10676/decommissioning-of-facilities |
| CCSDS 650.0-M-2, Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (2012; technically identical to ISO 14721:2012; the edition cited in this chapter, since revised as M-3 / ISO 14721:2025) | https://ccsds.org/Pubs/650x0m2.pdf |
| CCSDS 650.0-M-3, Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) (2024, current edition) | https://ccsds.org/Pubs/650x0m3.pdf |
| ISO 14721:2025, Space data and information transfer systems — Open archival information system (OAIS) — Reference model (March 2025, current edition; archived January 2026) | https://web.archive.org/web/20260102051523/https://www.iso.org/standard/87471.html |
| OECD/NEA, Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations: Developing a Key Information File for a Radioactive Waste Repository (2019) | https://doi.org/10.1787/89f089d5-en |
| OECD/NEA, Preservation of Records, Knowledge and Memory (RK&M) Across Generations: Final Report of the RK&M Initiative | https://doi.org/10.1787/50292bbb-en |
| IAEA, The IAEA's Net Enabled Waste Management Database: Overview and current status | https://inis.iaea.org/records/ef8jf-3ex20 |
| IAEA, Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Information System (SRIS) (replaced NEWMDB; archived January 2026) | https://web.archive.org/web/20260104141210/https://www.iaea.org/resources/databases/spent-fuel-and-radioactive-waste-information-system-sris |
| U.S. DOE, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant — WIPP site page (archived March 2026) | https://web.archive.org/web/20260304235358/https://wipp.energy.gov/wipp-site.asp |
| U.S. DOE, Waste Isolation Pilot Plant home page (archived December 2025) | https://web.archive.org/web/20251226085932/https://wipp.energy.gov/ |
WIA Standards — WIA-ENE-026 — Chapter 8. Hongik Ingan (弘益人間) — Benefit All Humanity.