Thirty-three countries agreed on Tuesday that stringent inspections, better cooperation and a stronger role for the UN should spearhead nuclear safety improvements following the Fukushima disaster.

Ministers and senior officials from advanced economies and developing giants acknowledged that Fukushima was a stern lesson in nuclear risk prevention and crisis management.

"We cannot continue to think the way we did before Fukushima," said France's ecology minister, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who chaired the meeting.

"What we have learned from this disaster, and what we must remember, is that one accident at a nuclear power plant is enough to create grave and irreversible consequences for man and the environment.

"It is essential to improve cooperation on nuclear safety in the civil sector, on the international level."

A statement outlined several proposals in a roster that will be put to a wider meeting this month.

Nuclear facilities should carry out "stress tests" based on early data from the Fukushima disaster, and follow this with regular checks to ensure safety standards were met.

In addition, "it appears necessary to reinforce the global role and missions of the International Atomic Energy Agency," especially its mechanisms for reviewing national safety frameworks, the statement said.

The UN's IAEA, at the G8 summit in Deauville last month, has already been asked to review its safety norms for power plants, taking into account earthquake risks and the impact from climate change.

As for nuclear crisis management, the meeting "reflected" on such options as emergency intervention teams and ways of pooling help, the statement said.

It called for harmonisation of procedures in the event of a nuclear crisis, for instance in determining the threshold above which iodine tablets should be distributed to civilians at risk from radioactivity.

Kosciusko-Morizet will present these policymakers' proposals to nuclear regulatory watchdogs on Wednesday.

The conclusions will then be put to a meeting in Vienna of the IAEA from June 20-24, a stepping stone towards new international guidelines and procedures for nuclear safety.

The disaster occurred when a tsunami, unleashed by a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, smashed into the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant, destroying backup systems designed to keep its reactors cool.

Jacques Repussard, director-general of France's Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), said he told the Paris meeting that safety watchdogs had to think the unthinkable.

"What happened in Japan had been considered completely unlikely, so it was not taken into account in the (design and safety) evaluation," he told a press conference.

"The Fukushima accident shows that we can no longer live with that uncertainty."

Earlier Tuesday, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said 770,000 terabecquerels of radiation escaped into the atmosphere in the first week of the Fukushima accident, more than double its earlier estimate of 370,000 terabecquerels.

The Paris meeting included representatives from the G8 economies as well as Brazil and India and from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA).

Participants included Germany and Switzerland, which have decided to phase out their nuclear plants, and France and Britain, which have stood by the atom.

Swiss Energy Minister Doris Leuthard told journalists she hoped that it would become mandatory for foreign experts to vet nuclear installations and for their reports to be made public.

Kosciusko-Morizet said the meeting did not debate "whether to quit nuclear or get involved in nuclear."

"I think if you asked all the people around the table, everyone would have expressed the greatest respect for the choices of other nations in this respect," she said.

"On the other hand, there was an unchallengeable agreement among all the participants in saying that nuclear safety takes first priority, regardless of the options."

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