Regulations – a Prescription for Long-Term Nuclear Material Protection, Control, and Accounting

The U.S. Nuclear Material Protection, Control, and Accounting (MPC&A) Program has been working with Russian agencies and ministries to develop a strengthened regulatory basis for protecting nuclear materials since 1995. Since the beginning of these activities, the MPC&A Regulatory Development Project has completed approximately one hundred thirty regulatory documents, and is currently working on an approximately seventy regulatory documents. Over two hundred additional regulatory documents have been identified for development between now and the end of this project in 2008. The new Russian regulatory structure that will result when this suite of new regulatory documents is complete is intended define a comprehensive and effective set of requirements, as well as guidance and model procedures for MPC&A. This regulatory structure has been mapped onto a series of “wall chart” views that provide a graphical representation of the levels and functionality of the various regulatory documents. These views are organized to present the regulatory documents that are relevant to a particular end user community. With the proposed regulatory structure now defined, a regulatory structural analysis is being performed to identify possible gaps, redundancies, and inconsistencies in the regulations. For completed regulatory documents, the actual regulatory documents are analyzed; for documents that do not yet exist, assumptions of what will be covered by the documents are used to perform this structural analysis. This analysis activity will continue throughout the life of the Regulatory Development Project to include more actual documents as they are completed. The Project recognized that producing a suite of regulatory documents and placing them into use was not enough to assure that they are effective. The need for developing methodologies and an indigenous infrastructure for evaluating the effectiveness of the implemented regulatory structure was recognized. The Project is defining a set of indicators and procedures for evaluating the effectiveness of the Russian regulatory system. Tools and processes developed and refined for developing, tracking, and evaluating these regulations over the eight years this project has been active are now being employed across multiple Russian Ministries and Agencies, as well as in other countries. This paper presents a description of the tools and processes used by the MPC&A Regulatory Development Project.