RISK MANAGEMENT AND THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE IN NUCLEAR SECURITY

With the growing recognition that risk cannot be eliminated from real world activities, the concept of risk management has emerged as an important element of corporate governance. More recently, the concepts of enterprise risk management have come to the fore in the business community, especially the financial community, as a means of balancing risks across the enterprise. As businesses and government agencies have attempted to implement the related concepts of risk management and enterprise risk management, a number of key issues have emerged, many of them common to the application of risk management principles to the security of Category I special nuclear material. In parallel with the efforts to manage risk within an enterprise, the so called Precautionary Principle has emerged and been applied to global issues such as environmental quality and genetic modification of organisms. The Precautionary Principle is based on ethical considerations rather than numerical evaluation of risk and is intended to be applied when the state of scientific knowledge is insufficient to provide assurance that systemic “ruin” is not credible. In the simplest terms, we should expect that risk management will use explicit risk assignments for each task and attempt to level risk across tasks and threats, while the Precautionary Principle will focus on the outcomes of (hopefully) small likelihood, tremendous consequence results of a particular activity. These approaches will be further discussed in the context of establishment of security requirements for the most sensitive special nuclear material assets.