Issues on Security Clearance for Nuclear Security in Japan

Japan has been continuously revising its nuclear security legislation and measures reflecting international enhancement trends, namely the update of INFCIRC/225 from Rev.4 to Rev.5. One of the most difficult tasks about nuclear security enhancement is how to examine and guarantee trustworthiness of personnel. While legislative measures to determine trustworthiness of personnel for nuclear security has not been established in Japan, Nuclear Regulation Authority, the nuclear regulatory body of Japan, set up a working group dedicated for this issue on January 24, 2014, and has been considering for design of institutional arrangements. Although this issue was discussed before by a variety of national governmental committees (e.g. Advisory Committee on Energy and Natural Resources), neither new legislations nor major legal revisions were made. This paper, by analyzing the reports of the committees and related minutes of the Diet, attempts to clarify the reasons why security clearance system for nuclear security has not been introduced in Japan. One of the reasons is that such a system was not established either for a long time even in national defense fields. In addition to this clarification, this paper also points out that even if legal revision about security clearance is made, all problems about insider threats yet remain to be solved. Among all, the most crucial point of security clearance system is what aspects should be clarified at what level (e.g. whether alcoholic or not) in order to ensure trustworthiness of personnel. This paper also analyzes several insider threats cases actually occurred in recent years to clarify shortcomings about the security clearance systems in those cases.