Material collected by Christopher Audland in his role as Commission co-ordinator in response to the Chernobyl disaster of 26 April 1986 and its aftermath. Among these files is what Audland called his "War Diary" written in the heat of the events during the first three months following the explosion, revised early in August 1986 and which were never touched again. The implications of Chernobyl were to dominate his final months in the Commission. His initial problem lay in getting accurate information about the accident as the Soviet Authorities were very slow in giving information of value and secondly, since the first oil crisis in 1973, industrialised countries had invested heavily in alternative power, particularly in nuclear energy. By 1986 over 30% of the EC's electicity was obtained from nuclear power and with the events in Chernobyl, public doubts about safety were increasing, fuelled by the reservations of three member states, Denmark, Greece and Ireland.
Audland worked hand in hand with Hans Blix of the IAEA in gleaning information about the actual situation as it evolved. For the Commission, the Euratom Treaty was a starting point along with the FAO, the WHO the NEA (nuclear energy agency of the OECD) and the IAEA, it was realised that greater co-operation was required about safety standards for reactors. The basis for the declaration of the Tokyo Summit by the Heads of State or Government of the seven major industrial nations and the Representatives of the EC were two documents published by the Vienna Agency (IAEA) and the Commission pamphlet of "Nuclear Safety in the EC" of 1985. It was by pure fortune that the Summit in Tokyo had been fixed to take place just nine days after the Chernobyl accident. The declaration offered assistance to the Soviet authorities, urged them to provide urgenty information on the nuclear emergency, stated their satisfaction with the Soviet Union's willingness to undertake discussions with the IAEA and their support for the work of the IAEA in seeking to improve international cooperation on the safety of nuclear installations, the handling of nuclear accidents and their consequences, and the provision of mututal emergency assistance.
On his return from Tokyo, the Commission had already made proposals on the levels of radio-activity to be permitted in different foodstuffs entering the Community and a communiqué was issued from Moscow giving more information and promising greater transparency and active collaboration with the Agency in the handling of accidents. The Commission began work on the production of a Framework Communication to the European Parliament and the Council and a plenary debate was held in the Parliament on 15 May to discuss the crisis. In the following week, the Governing board of the Vianna Agency held a special post-Chernobyl session detailling the IAEA's subsequent work and on 10 June the Framework Communicaton was finalised by the Commission.
Audland's last act as Director-General for Energy was to attend a meeting of the IEA Governing Board in September in Paris, from where he left for Vienna in his new role as Special Adviser to the Commission on nuclear matters, to represent the Commission at the Annual Conference of the Agency, where he stressed the improvement in Euratom/IAEA co-operation and the problems of nuclear safeguards and the merits of safeguards inspectors.