In early fall, Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will recommend whether the civilian nuclear energy regulator should overhaul federal rules about securing special nuclear material, an agency official said during a public meeting on Wednesday.
Staff were due to turn in their notation vote paper to the commission by September, said Marshall Kohen, a technical assistant in the agency’s Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, who spoke during a live-streamed, public-comment meeting.
In August, after rejecting their recommendation to cancel a special nuclear material security requirements rulemaking altogether, NRC commissioners ordered staff to prepare a report on other options for locking down special nuclear material at certain civilian reactors.
Staff have now narrowed the options down to seven, including tightening security requirements on special nuclear material, broadening the type of materials that have to be treated as special nuclear materials or, on the other end of the spectrum, doing nothing at all and leaving regulations as they are.
Special nuclear material is a legal category that includes plutonium, uranium-233 and uranium-235, fissile elements that can be used to create nuclear weapons.
NRC’s 2021 decision to keep the rulemaking on life support reversed a 2019 commission decision to pull the plug on tweaks to the federal rules for special nuclear material security, which at that point had been nearly a decade in the making following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington.
Prior to the rulemaking’s death and near-resurrection, the commission in 2015 published a roughly 200-page regulatory basis document that represented the agency’s biggest effort to date at revising special nuclear material security regulations at certain civilian facilities. Staff said they will consider the merits of that document in their impending report to the commissioners.
At Wednesday’s meeting, the Union of Concerned Scientists argued for stricter security regulations on the grounds that malappropriation of special nuclear material could have “horrific consequences” for the public, according to Edward Lyman, director of the environmental advocacy group’s nuclear power safety climate and energy program.
Also at the meeting, various industry stakeholders complained that the NRC had not revealed enough of its thinking about the possibly-resurrected rulemaking, and that the agency had not been clear about the sort of feedback it wanted from facility owners and operators.
NRC staff were charged “to consider … options for where rulemaking could be undertaken, but we are not at the place of a regulatory basis where we have a lot of details and proposals,” said Michelle Sampson, acting director of the NRC’s division of physical and cyber security. “[T]he things that we’re looking for and that we’re trying to consider really are ‘where are the gaps with our current regulations, what has changed in the industry that might impact the effectiveness of the regulations for future applicants?’”
Sampson declined to say whether NRC staff would hold another public comment period before turning in their report to the commissioners in September.
