The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently issued three recommendations for the director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in regards to determining security measures for radioactive material.
The GAO is required to review NRC’s security requirements for high-risk radioactive material under the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2015.
The GAO’s report examined NRC’s 2016 evaluation of its security requirements for high-risk radioactive material and the extent that radioactive security experts agreed NRC’s assessment of risk includes all relevant criteria.
The 18 experts said NRC’s assessments of radioactive material risks do not include all the relevant criteria.
NRC limits its criteria to the fatalities and health effects from radiation. These are unlikely to result from a radiological dispersal device (RDD), according to the experts and recent studies.
Deaths could result from evacuations, and socioeconomic impacts also need to be considered, the experts said.
Recommendations are directing staff to consider socioeconomic consequences and fatalities from evacuations when determining what security measures should be required for radioactive materials from RDDs, requiring additional security measures for high-risk quantities of certain category 3 radioactive materials and requiring all licensees to implement additional security measures when they have multiple quantities of category 3 americium-241 at a single facility.