December 2013
The announcement of the "Atoms for Peace" programme by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953 and the First Atomic Energy Conference in Geneva in 1955 aroused great expectations worldwide for this new form of energy, but were also accompanied by an awareness of the extraordinary dangers associated with nuclear fission. In the same decade, three international institutions were founded to promote the widespread use of nuclear energy, but also to prevent its misuse and avoid damage caused by radioactivity: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the OECD, are concerned with the overall use of nuclear energy.
There are also a number of specialist organisations that focus on reactor and plant safety or radiation protection.
While each country decides autonomously on the use or non-use of nuclear energy, the aim of international cooperation has always been to share knowledge and experience and to achieve the greatest possible harmonisation of applicable standards and safety requirements. The awareness that radioactivity does not stop at national borders and that public opinion is also influenced by incidents in distant countries, as the reactor accidents in Harrisburg (USA), Chernobyl (former Soviet Union) and Fukushima (Japan) have shown, has further increased the intensity of international cooperation.