The Legislative and Regulatory Framework for the Security of Nuclear and Other Radioactive Material out of Regulatory Control: A Virtual Implementing Guide

The Nuclear Security Fundamentals and the Nuclear Security Recommendations on Nuclear and Other Radioactive Material Out of Regulatory Control (MORC) clearly indicate that a nuclear security regime's legislative and regulatory framework should address MORC. In contrast to regulated material and facilities, however, these and other relevant IAEA guidance publications address the content of legislative and regulatory frameworks for MORC in a largely indirect manner. With several exceptions, one must infer such content from guidance provisions addressing the technical content of a nuclear security regime as it relates to MORC. For States establishing or evaluating the completeness of their legislative and regulatory frameworks for MORC, this circumstance represents a challenge: they must reverse engineer such guidance. Several other considerations compound this challenge. First, the concept of a legislative and regulatory framework for MORC is not intuitively obvious: it may first seem odd that nuclear security (with respect to material that by definition is not subject to regulatory control) should be governed by legislation and regulations. Second, within this domain States employ many different types of documents – such as memoranda of understanding, interagency agreements, strategy and policy documents, administrative manuals, procedures, protocols and forms – that may not always be recognized as regulatory in nature. To help address these issues, this paper provides an overall description and rationale for a legislative and regulatory framework for MORC, distills the major components of such a framework from the relevant IAEA guidance, and discusses the various forms which regulatory documents addressing particular components of the framework could take. (author)