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

Transcript for: Licensing Dangerous Radioactive Materials

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with David Trimble, Director,
Natural Resources and Environment

Related GAO Work: GAO-16-330: Nuclear Security: NRC Has Enhanced the
Controls of Dangerous Radioactive Materials, but Vulnerabilities Remain

Released: July 2016


[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's July
2016. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates domestic medical,
industrial, and research uses of certain radioactive sources. Concerns
have been raised, including in a previous GAO report, about the
licensing process that the NRC and states used to ensure that these
materials don't fall into the wrong hands. A team lead by David Trimble,
a director in GAO's Natural Resources and Environment team recently
tested these controls by setting up fake businesses. Jacques Arsenault
sat down with David to talk about what they found.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] In this report you were looking at how secure the
system for licensing dangerous radioactive materials is. Can you tell me
what your team did to test this system and what you found?

[ David Trimble: ] We went into three states, set up fake businesses in
each of those states, we rented office space or in like an industrial
park or an office park but we took no efforts to improve the space, you
know buying equipment to make it look legitimate, we just had empty
space. What we found was in two of the states the licensing controls
were quite effective.They found us out quite readily. They either
recognized immediately that the site was not appropriate to the business
we were pretending to be or they checked and poke at our references and
found that they were fake. So that was quite good to see.However, in one
state we were able to get a license and it was for a dangerous quantity
of radiological material. Once we had the license we kind of went to
town.We then went to a vendor, we got a commitment for an order of the
dangerous quantity of radiological material. Then because the license
was paper we altered that license and went to a second vendor and got an
additional commitment for a dangerous quantity of radiological material.
What's important here is that when you combine those two you've jumped
up the sort of the threat or the risk level because you've got a lot of
radiological material which is considered significantly dangerous by
both the NRC and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The one thing I
would point out as part of this is the vendors did nothing wrong in our
test.There's no requirement for them to verify the legitimacy of our
license so the breakdown here was not with the vendors, it was with the
regulatory process itself.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now GAO had actually looked at similar processes
back in 2007 and had some concerns about the process then. What has the
nuclear regulatory commission done since then to strengthen the system?

[ David Trimble: ] Really NRC had taken a lot of steps and took our
findings from our 2007 report quite seriously.They instituted mandatory
site visits for new applicants, they issued new guidance on issuing
licenses and they'd established a web based licensing and verification
systems for the most dangerous of these materials.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So, it sounds like there's some holes in the
system even if it's been strengthened over recent years.Can you give me
a sense of what types of radioactive materials are we talking about
here?

[ David Trimble: ] Yeah, it's much more common than most people realize,
the radiological materials or radioactive materials are used in
hospitals both to detect and to treat diseases such as cancer; blood
irradiators is a good example there. They're used in industrial settings
for example in fracking, inspecting pipes, that kind of work.They're
also used by FDA to irradiate food, to make sure that certain pests
aren't brought into the country. So it's quite extensive and then the
NRC is part of this, the role that they're playing when they're
partnering with the states is to make sure that the licensing process
ensures that the end users are legitimate and they also have rules
regarding the security and storage of these materials to make sure they
are not stolen or diverted to a terrorist or someone else who has got
bad intentions for this material.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then given NRC's role and what we know about
the risks can you talk about the recommendations that GAO is making in
this report?

[ David Trimble: ] Yeah, it's really pretty straight forward what we're
asking NRC to do is to bring the enhanced controls they've put in place
to all the dangerous materials. So that would include sort of the
tracking controls, improving the tracking and also tightening controls
used to verify the legitimacy of licenses before vendors actually agree
to sell this material.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Finally, what would you say is the bottom line of
this report?

[ David Trimble: ] I think the bottom line is you know the threat of a
dirty bomb is very, very serious. So the image you can think of on a
dirty bomb is if you think of the Boston Marathon bomb, if that bomb had
radiological material it would have been a very, very different scene
and set of consequences. The other part of this is that we've invested
billions of dollars at the borders both in the United States and we've
spent a significant amount of money overseas to detect the smuggling of
this radiological material,to keep someone, a terrorist from bringing in
a dirty bomb to this country.It's critical when facing this threat that
we improve our licensing process and that security measures both in the
U.S. at the sites that use these materials to secure this material so it
doesn't get diverted and used in a bomb. I mean the point is why bother
smuggling it if you can just order it with a fake license or steal it
from a hospital or industrial facility.

[ Background Music ]

[Narrator:] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the
next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional
watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.