Türkiye’s emergency plans excel at nuclear accidents but stumble on security events

When a radiological alarm sounds, the first minutes decide everything. Responders must decide whether they are facing an accidental release, an orphaned medical source, or something deliberately placed by an attacker. Each answer demands a different constellation of institutions: emergency managers, radiation regulators, police, forensic specialists, health services, and public communicators, all operating under distinct legal mandates. A new study of Türkiye’s national emergency management system suggests that while the country’s planning architecture is well built for accidents, it leaves the deliberate case—the nuclear security event—far less clearly specified in its public documents.

The research, published in Frontiers in Nuclear Engineering by Zeyneb Camtakan and Didem Saloglu of Istanbul Technical University, takes a structured look at how nuclear security event response is written into Türkiye’s all-hazards emergency planning system. Rather than testing operational performance, the authors conducted a documentary analysis of fourteen publicly available governance documents, ranging from national disaster response plans and CBRN regulations to provincial risk reduction plans and an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) peer review report. They then applied the Four C framework—communication, coordination, collaboration, and cooperation—to assess how institutional interfaces are defined when an emergency is initiated by an intentional act rather than an accident.

The stakes are not hypothetical. The IAEA’s Incident and Trafficking Database has recorded thousands of incidents involving nuclear or radioactive material outside regulatory control since 1993, including thefts, losses, and events of undetermined intent. Many occur during authorized transport, extending risk well beyond guarded facilities into hospitals, industrial sites, and roadways. Radioactive sources used in medicine and industry may lack the weapons potential of fissile material, but their wide distribution and uneven oversight make them a persistent governance challenge. Nuclear security, as the IAEA defines it, spans the prevention, detection, and response to criminal or intentional unauthorized acts—a problem that requires law enforcement and emergency management to work in parallel, not in sequence.

Türkiye offers an analytically rich case. The country rebuilt its disaster governance after the devastating 1999 Marmara Earthquake, establishing the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) in 2009 as a central coordinator. Since 2018, it has pursued sweeping nuclear reform: creating the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NDK), enacting Nuclear Regulation Law No. 7381, and developing secondary legislation on physical protection, cyber security, and insider threats. International scrutiny has followed, including an IAEA Physical Protection Advisory Service mission in 2021 and a Regulatory Review Service mission in 2022. As the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant takes shape and radioactive sources proliferate across medical and industrial applications, the question of how security events would be handled within the all-hazards system has grown more urgent.

The planning architecture itself is substantial. AFAD coordinates response through the Türkiye Disaster Response Plan (TAMP), supported by risk reduction and recovery plans, while nuclear and radiological emergencies fall under the National Radiation Emergency Plan (URAP). URAP organizes emergencies into five categories, with Categories I through III covering facility-based scenarios of escalating severity, Category IV addressing events outside fixed facilities—including transport incidents, material out of regulatory control, and deliberate criminal use of radioactive sources—and Category V covering emergencies originating abroad. The alignment between URAP and TAMP gives radiological emergency response a genuine legal and organizational foundation. The problem emerges with intent: nuclear security events are not defined as a distinct response category, and Category IV provisions for deliberate acts are written in hazy modal language—responders “should” preserve the scene, “should” establish a cordon—rather than the declarative obligations and time-bound sequences that govern accident procedures.

The study identifies several partially specified interfaces that could matter enormously in a real event. Command transition is one: URAP designates AFAD as national coordinator but does not define the point at which law enforcement assumes operational primacy when an event turns out to be criminal. Forensic evidence management is another—category IV procedures mention scene preservation but do not specify how chain-of-custody requirements are maintained during radiation monitoring, decontamination, or source recovery. Security-sensitive information sharing, the activation pathway from detection to response, and the timing of international notification all sit in similar procedural gray zones. The contrast with accident procedures is stark: facility scenarios require a General Emergency declaration within 15 minutes and notification of the Provincial Governor within 30, while deliberate-act scenarios carry no equivalent institutional assignments or timelines.

Institutional reform has also outpaced planning revision. URAP, issued in 2019, still assigns Category IV technical support functions to the former Turkish Atomic Energy Authority (TAEK), even though regulatory and technical responsibilities were later split between NDK and the Turkish Energy, Nuclear and Mineral Research Agency (TENMAK). A responder following the current plan would be directed toward an institution that no longer exists in its former form. Similar planning lag has been documented in China, where legal responsibilities remained attached to defunct agencies, and in Indonesia, suggesting the pattern is not unique to Türkiye. Compounding the issue, URAP’s revision triggers cover exercise deficiencies and legislative change but not organizational restructuring, so reforms do not automatically flow into operative plans.

Detection capacity, meanwhile, is not the bottleneck. Türkiye operates RADISA, a national radiation monitoring network of 239 fixed stations integrated into European data exchange platforms, and TENMAK has developed domestic mobile radiological detection systems with demonstrated field performance. But a monitoring alert does not distinguish accident from attack—that interpretation depends on predefined assessment, notification, and coordination arrangements among technical authorities, emergency managers, and police. The public documents do not spell out those arrangements, and RADISA alert data do not appear to be formally integrated into security-specific activation procedures. Exercises reinforce the asymmetry: URAP mandates a three-year full-scale exercise cycle for nuclear power plant scenarios, but no equivalent requirement exists for Category IV criminal or radiological dispersal events, and a December 2025 full-scale exercise in Mersin rehearsed a facility accident rather than a security scenario.

The Arifiye incident of October 2016 illustrates how these interfaces converge in practice. A suspected radioactive material report drew the AFAD CBRN team, police, TAEK, health authorities, and company representatives to a construction site in Sakarya province. Measurements were taken, a security perimeter established, residents moved, potentially exposed persons assessed, and the source secured by TAEK, which later determined irradiation rather than contamination had occurred. The case, documented by AFAD, shows multiple response functions operating simultaneously—but the public record does not indicate how evidence preservation, chain of custody, or potential criminal investigation were coordinated, or whether the operational lessons were formally folded back into planning. The authors are careful to note the study does not assess operational performance or classified capabilities; it diagnoses what is visible in public governance documents, not what may exist behind them.

The broader lesson extends well beyond Türkiye. Formal alignment within an all-hazards framework, the study concludes, does not by itself ensure operational specification for nuclear security events, because intentional acts shatter the linear phase structure that conventional emergency plans assume—consequence management, threat neutralization, and criminal investigation must proceed simultaneously, not sequentially. Comparative examples point toward practical fixes: Ontario’s nuclear emergency plan explicitly assigns consequence management to emergency managers in support of police command, and the United States Nuclear/Radiological Incident Annex presumes a potential terrorist incident is treated as actual until determined otherwise, enabling early activation of law enforcement structures. Türkiye’s own regulatory instruments, including the 2020 CBRN duty regulation, already assign relevant responsibilities across institutions; what is missing is the publicly specified coordination layer that defines authority, timing, information flow, and sequencing when an emergency begins with intent. For states expanding nuclear programs on all-hazards foundations, the implication is clear: nuclear security response should be woven into public emergency planning through clearly defined interfaces—not by converting general plans into security plans, but by ensuring that communication, coordination, collaboration, and cooperation are each specified for the event no one wants to rehearse.

Subject of Research: Plan alignment and institutional interfaces for nuclear security event response within Türkiye's all-hazards emergency management system

Article Title: Plan alignment and operational interfaces in nuclear security event response: evidence from Türkiye’s all-hazards emergency management system

Article References: Plan alignment and operational interfaces in nuclear security event response: evidence from Türkiye’s all-hazards emergency management system. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fnuen.2026.1860013

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fnuen.2026.1860013

Keywords: nuclear security, emergency management, all-hazards planning, Türkiye, radiological emergency, IAEA, institutional coordination, nuclear forensics, AFAD, command transition, crisis governance, disaster response planning