MATERIALS AND PLANT PROTECTION STANDARDS

The Atomic Energy Commission has been encouraging the development of standards on an accelerated basis for some time. Both Commissioner James T. Ramey and AECRegulation Director L. Manning Muntzing emphasized the need for standards in remarks at the ANS sponsored Executive Conference on Nuclear Standards in May 1972.!>2 Mr. Muntzing discussed the then-recent establishment of a Directorate of Regulatory Standards in order to, in his words, "put drive behind our standards work." He requested an intensified and better standards effort from industry. More recently. Commissioner Doub stated that standards development and implementation is "a joint responsibility of the industry and the AEC working within the framework of the national standards writing organizations."3 As part of the Directorate of Regulatory Standards, a staff was organized to develop materials and plant protection standards. This group has been working since May 1972 with the broad objective, in the interests of national security and public health and safety, of establishing balanced, graded regulations and regulatory guides for (1) physical security and accountability to protect against, deter, and detect theft or diversion of strategic quantities of special nuclear material and (2) physical security to protect against and deter industrial sabotage of plants containing, processing, or otherwise using such material.