A New Rule to Protect Radioactive Material (CRS)
A forthcoming Nuclear Regulatory Commission rule on the physical protection of radioactive “byproduct materials” — not including uranium or plutonium — is discussed in a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
“The rule will have broad impacts across the country and across most if not all aspects of industries that use radioactive material, including hospital and blood bank irradiators, industrial radiography equipment, massive facilities for irradiating certain foods and medical supplies, laboratory equipment for research into radiation and its effects, state regulators, and manufacturers, distributors, and transporters of radioactive sources. NRC anticipates that the rule will be published in the Federal Register in early 2013.”
See Nuclear Regulatory Commission 10 C.F.R. 37, A New Rule to Protect Radioactive Material: Background, Summary, Views from the Field, December 14, 2012.
Congress has directed CRS not to make its reports directly available to the public.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.