The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Radiological Security (ORS), part of the Department of Energy, announced this week that it partnered with Jordan's Energy and Minerals Regulatory Commission (EMRC) to replace all of Jordan’s high-activity cesium-137 irradiators with X-ray technology.

Sherwood-Randall

The Biden administration on March 2 announced a new strategy to remove and secure certain highly radioactive materials that are used in hospitals and other civilian commercial facilities as a measure to prevent such materials from being acquired by terrorists for making “dirty bombs” or other weapons. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, White House assistant to the president for Homeland Security, shared the details of the National Security Memorandum to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism and Advance Nuclear and Radioactive Material Security (NSM19) later that same day in a discussion at the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) global security organization in Washington, D.C., according to a report in the New York Times.

National strategy: Biden’s newly signed NSM 19 “integrates, in a systematic way, U.S. policies to counter the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons by non-state actors; sets out unified priorities for Departments and Agencies across the Federal government; and affirms the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to work with state, local, tribal, international, and private sector partners on preventing, mitigating, and responding to WMD terrorism threats.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has proposed an $8,000 fine for a Connecticut hospital for violations involving the temporary loss of a radioactive source used to calibrate nuclear medicine dosage-measuring equipment.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has published its annual report to Congress on “abnormal occurrences” for the previous fiscal year, identifying a total of nine incidents in FY 2019.

An abnormal occurrence is defined by the NRC as an unscheduled incident or event that it determines to be significant from a public health or safety standpoint. The NRC uses specific criteria, updated in October 2017, for determining which events qualify.