ANS concerns over Section 402

Tuesday, 14 October 2014

The American Nuclear Society has written to a Senate committee expressing its concerns that a new bill will politicize the way the national nuclear regulator oversees security of radiological materials.

Safety and regulatory oversight of radiological sources is provided cooperatively by NRC and 37 so-called "agreement states" which maintain the authority to license and inspect radiological materials within their borders.

Most recently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) conducted a comprehensive update of its regulations for radiation sources under Title 10 CFR Part 37, addressing many of the same issues identified in the Senate bill's provisions in subjecting them to extensive public review and comment.

But Section 402 of the 2015 Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill would require NRC "to discard its established regulatory framework" in favour of mandatory security standards established by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Global Threat Reducation Initiative (GTRI) for 'high risk radiological material', ANS said.

In a letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development dated 10 October, ANS "urges strong policies to secure and protect radiological material from misuse." The letter, from ANS President Michaele Brady Raap, was addressed to subcommittee chair Dianne Feinstein and subcommittee ranking member Lamar Alexander.

"ANS supports basic security requirements for all radiation sources and believes that enhanced security should be applied to higher risk materials classified as Category 1 or 2 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)," Brady Raap wrote.

"We understand that this is the generally-intended purpose of Section 402. However, we are concerned that the language as written would set a harmful precedent, wherein an independent regulatory agency (NRC) is essentially forced to reject its own standards and criteria in favour of those developed by a cabinet department (the Department of Energy and NNSA), which by its very nature is more sensitive to politics and not bound by risk-informed processes."

ANS wants the subcommittee to revise this language to ensure that NRC's authority is not in any way subordinated to NNSA or any other executive branch agency.

It also has concerns about Section 402(f), "which as written would mandate the eventual prohibition" of NRC licenses for workhorse radioisotopes such as cobalt 60, caesium 137, americium 241, and californium 252, - "without due consideration of the cost, reliability, risks and overall effectiveness of potential substitute technologies."

ANS believes it is reasonable to ask licensees seeking to replace current systems that use high specific activity radiological sources to review available alternatives. However, ANS strongly opposes "the language prohibiting NRC from licensing certain radiological sources 15 years after enactment."

It added that, "while there may be a need to improve clarity in compliance for licensees of radiological sources", the Radiation Source Protection and Security Task Force - an advisory body created by Congress to review the security of radiological materials - has issued three (NNSA-endorsed) reports since 2006 that found "no significant gaps in our current security protocols."

ANS has 11,000 members.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News