The fundamental principles of safety are the bases that must be followed to achieve adequate levels of safety in nuclear and radioactive facilities.

All these principles are based on one primary objective:

To ensure that nuclear and radioactive facilities achieve this objective, measures must be taken to:

These principles must be contemplated by all facilities and activities that use sources of ionizing radiation during all stages of their life (planning, siting, design, manufacturing, construction, operation, dismantling and closure).

Based on these basic principles, ten security principles have been formulated. These ten apply in any installation, however, depending on their different characteristics, in each of them some principles or others will be more important.