From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Security Risks

Description: Data Breaches have affected hundreds of millions of 
Americans. GAO explores what we can do to better protect ourselves. 

Related GAO Work: GAO-19-468: Combating Nuclear Terrorism: NRC Needs to 
Take Additional Actions to Ensure the Security of High Risk 
Radioactive Material

Released: April 2019


[ Background Music ]

[ David Trimble: ] NRC needs to rethink its approach to risk analysis 
of its supplemental security regulations for radiological materials.

[ Matt Oldham: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news 
and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I'm 
Matt Oldham. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is responsible for 
ensuring the security of radioactive material used throughout the 
United States. I'm with David Trimble, a Natural Resources and 
Environment director at GAO, and he led a report looking at how the NRC 
considers the security risks from radioactive material. Thanks for 
joining me, David.

[ David Trimble: ] Thank you very much for having me.

[ Matt Oldham: ] So, what are the security risks involved with 
radioactive material?

[ David Trimble: ] Well, the risk that we've largely focused on in this 
report and the body of work we've undertaken the last few years has 
been the risk that these materials would be stolen or misused in a 
dirty bomb, which is also a radiological dispersal device. It's 
basically a conventional explosive wrapped with radioactive material 
that creates widespread contamination. If you think about the Boston 
Marathon bomber, that was a conventional explosive. If that had been 
wrapped in radiological material, it would have been a devastating 
dirty bomb.

[ Matt Oldham: ] And, so what types of radioactive material are we 
talking about?

[ David Trimble: ] Radiological material is used everywhere throughout 
the country. It has widespread uses in industry, it has widespread uses 
in medicine, so radiological materials we find in hospitals in every 
city in this country, as well as many industrial sites.

[ Matt Oldham: ] How does the NRC consider security risks from this 
radiological material?

[ David Trimble: ] Well, that's really what prompted this review. We 
were asked to assess whether NRC's analysis of risks when it's 
establishing its security requirements, whether that analysis was 
comprehensive. NRC regulates all radiological material and right now 
they issue health and safety regulations for all quantities of 
radiological material. They also issue supplement security 
requirements, but they only issue supplemental security requirements on 
the largest quantities of radiological materials, not all quantities of 
radiological materials.

[ Matt Oldham: ] Earlier, you used the Boston Marathon bombing as an 
example and you said it could cause quite a bit of damage to life and 
property. Is that a small amount of radiological material in that 
example you're talking about, or the larger amounts that you're saying 
the NRC currently considers?

[ David Trimble: ] That's a great way of phrasing it, and I think 
that's the $64,000 question. What our work found, and we convened a 
panel with the National Academies of Sciences of international experts 
on radiological security in doing this work. And what we found 
discussing with them as well as expert studies is that even a smaller 
quantity of some radiological materials can have huge socioeconomic 
impact. So, the smaller quantities that are not currently subject to 
security requirements can create big problems, and the scale of this, 
we're talking tens of billions of dollars in socioeconomic impact. And 
you can imagine in the Boston scenario, you have a dirty bomb go off, 
you have mass evacuations, you have large segments of the city that 
have to be decontaminated, you have impact on businesses. If they're 
residences, those people have to be relocated. So, the immediate and 
direct cost from that is tremendous.

[ Background Music ]

[ Matt Oldham: ] So, it sounds like, while there could be considerable 
threat to life and property if radiological material was weaponized, 
even smaller quantities of this material could have enormous impact. 
So, why doesn't the NRC pay as much attention to these smaller 
quantities?

[ David Trimble: ] When we approached NRC on this, what emerged from 
our work is that when it's doing its risk analysis and setting its 
security requirements, it does not consider the socioeconomic impact of 
a dirty bomb. NRC's analysis is limited to looking only at the prompt 
fatalities or the immediate health effects that would occur from an 
incident. For a dirty bomb, there's a lack of logic to this approach in 
that dirty bombs, by their nature, do not produce prompt fatalities. 
They are weapons of terror, they are weapons of disruption, but aside 
from the explosive itself, the radiation from a dirty bomb would not 
cause a prompt fatality. Even if you had large quantities of 
radiological material and, in some cases, NRC pointed out to us in 
their arguments if you took all of the radiological material of a 
certain type in the country and put it in a dirty bomb and blew it up, 
it still wouldn't cause a prompt fatality. So, they've set the bar to a 
very peculiar place which almost precludes them from considering adding 
additional security requirements.

[ Matt Oldham: ] So, what recommendations did the team have for NRC?

[ David Trimble: ] NRC should begin considering socioeconomic effects 
in their analyses and one point on that that I should make is, this 
isn't an issue of limited legal authority. They have this authority 
under the Atomic Energy Act to consider these things. It was at their 
discretion not to consider these. We also had a recommendation to 
require additional security measures for smaller quantities of some of 
these materials. I should note that NRC disagreed with our 
recommendations. Their position was that the evidence we presented was 
not sufficient. We strongly disagree with that assessment. We stand by 
these recommendations. As I noted, much of our work was based on a 
international group of radiological security experts that the National 
Academies of Sciences help put together for us. It is also based on 
three studies by Sandia, the Department of Energy lab, which is one of 
the leading centers on radiological risks. So, we feel very strongly 
that our evidence is sufficient and believe that, given the 
information, the new information that we've developed in this report, 
it's really important for NRC to act on these recommendations.

[ Matt Oldham: ] So, what do you believe is the bottom line of this 
report?

[ David Trimble: ] NRC needs to rethink its approach to its risk 
analysis and re-examine the sufficiency of its supplemental security 
regulations for radiological materials.

[ Matt Oldham: ] David Trimble is a Natural Resources and Environment 
director, and he led a GAO report on NRC's security assessments of 
high-risk radioactive material. Thank you for your time, David.

[ David Trimble: ] Thank you.

[ Background Music ]

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[ Background Music ]

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