Basic guidelines for the creation of a nuclear regulatory agency

In the 1950s, the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN) was created, a Federal Autonomy that, dismembered by Brazilian National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), emerged with the main objectives of developing nuclear energy and its applications, as well as controlling the nuclear area of the country, ensuring their safety. The importance of setting up an independent regulatory agency for the nuclear sector, i.e. the separation of CNEN activities focused on the safety of development activities and basic non-regulatory research is very old and has always been a topic debated by the scientific community. This issue has again gained momentum and a draft Bill for the creation of an independent regulatory agency for the nuclear sector has been drafted and is being evaluated by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications (MCTIC). The objective of this work was to present guidelines for the creation of a regulatory agency of the nuclear sector performing a methodological research through the use of a questionnaire and applied research since it intends to solve a real problem in an institution that accumulates security functions with functions of technological development that in practice should be separated as previously pointed out. These guidelines are presented at the end of the paper. A questionnaire distributed to CNEN managers and former managers was used, containing questions related to a regulatory agency that helped complete the set of proposed guidelines. As a result of this work, sixteen recommendations / main guidelines are presented for the creation of a nuclear agency in Brazil. (author)