The World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO)

What WANO is

The World Association of Nuclear Operators is a non-profit international organisation whose members are the companies and authorities that operate commercial nuclear power plants. Uniquely, membership is effectively universal: if you run a nuclear reactor to generate electricity, you belong to WANO. Its coordinating centre is in London, supported by regional centres around the world.

Its single, unwavering mission is to maximise the safety and reliability of nuclear power stations everywhere. Note that it is not a regulator and holds no legal authority. It works alongside official bodies, adding a layer of professional self-scrutiny that operators impose on themselves and on each other, on the principle that they have the deepest technical understanding of how their own plants actually behave.

Born from Chernobyl

WANO exists because of a catastrophe. The 1986 Chernobyl accident in the then Soviet Union was the worst in the history of civil nuclear power, and its consequences crossed borders in every sense: radioactive contamination spread across Europe, and public trust in nuclear energy collapsed far beyond the country where the accident happened.

The lesson operators drew was blunt. A serious failure at any one plant is a failure for the whole industry, because it damages confidence in nuclear power globally. Working in national silos, each utility guarding its own information, was no longer defensible. In 1989, operators from around the world came together to form WANO, precisely so that safety knowledge would flow freely across borders and competitive lines.

That founding logic still defines the organisation. WANO treats the global fleet as a single safety community in which everyone has a stake in everyone else's performance.

How WANO raises safety: peer review

The heart of WANO's method is peer review. Teams of experienced staff drawn from operators in other countries visit a member plant and examine, in detail, how it is run: from control-room discipline and maintenance routines to the harder-to-measure question of safety culture. They benchmark what they find against international good practice and set out both strengths and areas to improve.

Because the reviewers are themselves operators, they bring credibility that an outside inspector cannot. They know where problems hide and cannot be easily fobbed off. The result is candid, technically deep, and difficult to ignore.

• Peer reviews that benchmark each plant against global good practice;
• Sharing of operating experience, so a near-miss at one station warns all the others;
• Technical support and professional development for operators;
• Emergency preparedness and lessons learned after major events.

Alongside peer review, WANO runs a system for sharing operating experience. When something goes wrong, or nearly does, at one plant, the details are circulated so that every other operator can check whether the same weakness exists in their own station. It turns isolated incidents into fleet-wide learning.

Why this matters for UK electricity

Britain has generated nuclear electricity for many decades, and nuclear has long supplied a significant share of the national total, historically around a sixth of the country's power. Its defining feature is that it produces large volumes of electricity around the clock without burning fossil fuels, which makes it a source of low-carbon, always-available generation that complements weather-dependent wind and solar.

The reliability of that supply rests on an intense safety culture, and organisations like WANO are part of what sustains it. UK operators sit inside the same global peer-review system as everyone else, meaning a British plant is scrutinised by international experts and, in turn, contributes its own operators to review plants abroad.

For a wider view of how low-carbon power fits into the UK mix, see our guide to renewable energy, and our environment guides for the broader climate picture. To understand who licenses and oversees the UK market itself, read our explainer on Ofgem.

Frequently asked questions