President Joe Biden on Thursday signed a classified memo establishing new rules for the permanent disposal of weapon-usable nuclear material and the handling of weaponizable radioactive substances, the White House announced.
National Security Memorandum 19 “establishes the first comprehensive policy for securing radioactive materials, which present continuing domestic and global risk, along with new domestic guidelines for the management and security of nuclear material by prioritizing efforts to protect and permanently dispose of weapons-usable materials of greatest concern,” according to a White House press release.
The memo also includes intra-government guidelines about chemical and biological weapons, according to the release.
“The public attention paid to these issues has frankly decreased,” Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, White House assistant to the President for homeland security and former deputy secretary of energy, said in a public appearance Thursday at the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative non-profit group. “In part, that is due to our collective success in reducing the threat.”
In her remarks, Sherwood-Randall confirmed the contents of the memo were classified. The former DOE No. 2 appeared at the nonprofit — which streamed the event on YouTube — alongside other government officials to discuss the White House’s release. Among those in attendance was Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
Sherwood-Randall said the classified memo 19 paid special attention to “low-probability, high-consequence threats…particularly the threat of nuclear terrorism.”
That is squarely in the domain of the NNSA’s office of Counterterrorism and Counter-proliferation, led by Jay Tilden. Tilden attended Thursday’s memo rollout at the Nuclear Threat Institute, but Hruby did the talking for the NNSA.
Hruby stuck mostly to high-level remarks about how the U.S. government can help other safely aware nuclear power plants.
“I actually think we are facing today two existential threats, both of which include nuclear,” Hruby said at the Nuclear Threat Institute panel. “One is climate change, where we need nuclear power as a solution. The other is the stuff that we’ve worked on, on preventing nuclear war…or anything associated with it.”
Hruby said that “we need nuclear power to expand, we need it to be safe, we need it to be safeguarded and we need it to be secure.”
One of the challenges there is “[h]ow to get U.S. industry and industry around the world to take safeguards and security at the same level as of importance as safety. I think they get it. I don’t think we’re doing it yet. And that’s our challenge, to do that.”
The government officials on Thursday’s panel discussed China often, including both the bulking up of Beijing’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and its plans to build nuclear power plants for foreign and domestic energy consumers.
In connection with China’s nuclear-power ambitions, Hruby said she “still maintain[s] contacts” at the China Center of Excellence on Nuclear Security in Beijing, which opened in 2016 and was intended to be a conduit to transfer international nuclear-security best practices to China.
“I’m hoping to visit with them to try to keep that relationship alive, which was very good at one point in time,” Hruby said Thursday.
