A good one! The General Audit of the Nation (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish) detected that "the concentrations of radio nuclear activity -monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Authority- do not exceed the limits established by current regulations."

The National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA, for its acronym in Spanish) is divided into three independent entities and one of them is the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (ARN), responsible for monitoring radiological, nuclear and physical safety.

According to the National Law of Nuclear Activity, the ARN "carries out an Annual Plan for Radiological Environmental Monitoring in the vicinity of nuclear and radioactive power plants." The basic principles of radiological protection are used, which aims to "maintain the exposure of the population as low as possible."

In this regard, the auditors pointed out that the project "is instrumented," although "there is still a need to include certain points such as the legal and institutional framework in which the plan is carried out, establish the resources allocated and a timetable for carrying out tasks", just to name a few.

This plan contemplates the construction of an annual indicator. The AGN observed that "sample sites were included that were not sampled", that is, they were not analyzed. This situation occurred, for example, at the Atucha I Nuclear Power Plant and the Embalse Nuclear Power Plant.

Regarding the last plant, it could be observed that "the scenario was repeated in the last three years of the audited period, which was from 2011 to the first half of 2014, and despite this, the planning was never modified."

Therefore, despite the AGN stressing that "it has met in 100% with the advertising of the Radiological Environmental Monitoring data it still does not have full compliance."

In the case of finding a value out of the ordinary, after communicating it to the Deputy Manager of Measurements in Radiological Safety and to the person in charge of the Monitoring Plan, "a documentary record of the evaluation must be created". However, "at the end of the audit this seat had not been formalized".

In a complementary manner, the auditors detailed that the internal audit department of the Nuclear Regulatory Authority "did not include evaluations of the Monitoring Plan in the period under analysis."

The report, approved in November 2016, states that one of the most significant areas of the Plan, the Technical Scientific Support Management, "does not have an instruction that indicates how to save the information in the database, how to have a backup of the information, format and period of custody and the confidentiality of the data," among others information.

The Institutional Strategic Plan 2012-2015 "was not published on the ARN's website or on its intranet." Nor was the Strategic Communications Plan published, "Despite having been approved in 2010." In the first plan, the AGN "detected advances, in the second it did not."

Finally, the audit objected that "the Regulatory Authority did not make available to the control body all the quarterly reports that were prepared for the nuclear power plants, which shows that they do not carry a statistical evaluation with trend analysis."