Are we there yet? Why is the sky blue? Why is rain wet? Children have an endless list of questions as they discover the world around them. But as we grow older, most people tend to ask fewer questions.

This may be due, at least in part, to the fact that we start to make assumptions about many of the things around us based on what we have already learned or observed. Sometimes we ask fewer questions because at some point, someone made us feel ashamed that we didn’t know the answer or made it clear they had more important things to do than respond to our questions.

Re-developing that questioning attitude we embraced as children, however, is very important to an organization’s health and critical to its safety culture.

The NRC’s Safety Culture Policy Statement includes “Questioning Attitude” as a trait of a positive safety culture. The policy statement describes it as a part of a culture where “individuals avoid complacency and continuously challenge existing conditions and activities in order to identify discrepancies that might result in error or inappropriate action.”

A questioning attitude helps to prevent “group think” by encouraging diversity of thought and intellectual curiosity. It challenges the entire organization to get clarification when something comes up that doesn’t seem right.

Examples include situations as simple as walking by a broken door day after day without stopping and questioning why it remains broken; or skipping over a confusing step in a procedure you use every day rather than getting clarification. It could include ignoring an alarm because nuisance alarms go off all the time and they never indicate an actual emergency. Or it could be something a little more complicated such as not speaking up to question a calculation that doesn’t seem right because the senior engineer performed the calculation.

A positive safety culture requires the collective commitment by both leaders and individual employees to emphasize safety over competing goals. A questioning attitude supports that commitment.

The idea of transporting nuclear materials can make people nervous. It’s easy to imagine worst-case accidents on the highway or involving a train. But stringent safety requirements, as well as coordination among federal agencies, international regulators, and state and local officials, help to ensure these shipments are made safely. This structure provides many layers of safety.

From time to time, the requirements are updated to address new information. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and U.S. Department of Transportation recently updated their requirements. The NRC is now amending ours to reflect those updates, as well as to make some changes we feel are needed based on recent experience. You can read the Federal Register notice on the proposed rule.

While the rules are being updated, the fact remains that nuclear materials are transported safely all the time. By far the majority of shipments involve small quantities of nuclear materials. Millions of these shipments are made each year and arrive at their destination without incident. Occasionally, the carrier might be involved in a traffic accident. But in decades of transporting nuclear materials, there has never been an accident that resulted in a radioactive release.

Smaller shipments must be made in compliance with DOT regulations for shipping hazardous materials. The greater the potential risk of the contents, the more stringent DOT’s packaging requirements are. The DOT regulations limit how much radioactivity can be transported in each package. That way, no transport accident involving these small shipments would pose a serious health threat.

But what about larger amounts of radioactive materials? What about spent nuclear fuel?

In addition to having to meet DOT requirements, more radioactive cargo such as spent fuel must meet NRC regulations for nuclear materials packaging and transport in 10 CFR Part 71. These regulations include very detailed requirements for shipping under normal conditions, as well as stringent tests to show the packages can withstand severe accidents. These are the regulations we are updating now.

If you would like to learn more about the transportation of spent fuel and radioactive materials, see our newly updated backgrounder.

It’s easy to imagine the sense of distress that must have washed over a portable nuclear gauge user one recent morning when he realized the device he had stowed in the back of his truck was missing. The gauge had apparently tumbled from his vehicle as he drove along a road near Martinsburg, W.Va.

Despite the gauge user’s prompt retracing of his steps, the device was nowhere to be found and, as of today, has not yet been retrieved.

While the search goes on, some perspective is in order regarding the use of such gauges, which contain sealed sources of radioactive materials and are designed to take measurements of soil density at construction and other work sites. The reality is the loss of these portable gauges is an infrequent occurrence and that is due, in large part, to the requirements developed over time to avoid that from happening.

Indeed, NRC and Agreement State regulations clearly spell out the precautions gauge operators must take when the devices are not in use. (Agreement States are those that have signed an agreement with the NRC to regulate nuclear materials used within their borders for which the NRC would otherwise be responsible.)

For one thing, there is a security requirement that a minimum of two independent physical controls must be utilized to prevent unauthorized removal of a gauge when it is not under direct control and surveillance of company personnel. For another, there must be constant surveillance of a gauge when it is in an unrestricted area.

When violations of these requirements occur in non-Agreement States, the NRC will consider whether enforcement action is warranted. Agreement States will do the same in their jurisdictions.

What’s more, the NRC and Agreement States conduct typically unannounced periodic inspections of gauge owners to discern whether security and other requirements are being properly followed.

Provided the sealed source remains inside the shielded gauge, it should not pose a threat to the person or persons who have it in their possession. Nevertheless, the device needs to be back in the hands of personnel qualified to handle such material as soon as possible.

In a post-9/11 world, the NRC takes very seriously the security of radioactive materials, from nuclear fuel used in power reactors to small amounts of radioactive material housed in portable gauges transported on pick-up trucks.

05/17/2013 – Updated: There is now a happy post-script to the case of portable nuclear gauge that went missing earlier this month in West Virginia.

On May 3, a Pennsylvania firm doing work in the Mountain State reported to the NRC that a gauge had fallen off one of its trucks and could not be located. The NRC issued a press release on May 6 advising the public to be on the lookout for the device.  The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) put out its own release regarding the missing gauge on May 14, based on the fact that its owner, Valley Quarries, is headquartered in Chambersburg, Pa., and is licensed by the state.

A break occurred on May 15 when a Maryland resident contacted the DEP to say he had spotted the gauge along a roadside near Martinsburg, W.Va., and placed it in his trunk after deciding it must be something important. It apparently remained there until being handed over to the DEP and, in turn, to Valley Quarries.

The good news is that a preliminary evaluation has found the gauge was apparently not damaged. A service provider for Valley Quarries will confirm that is the case. n the meantime, the NRC’s inspection of the loss of the gauge is still in progress. As part of that review, the NRC and DEP teamed up for an inspection at the company’s headquarters late last week to evaluate safety and security protocols used by the firm with respect to its portable nuclear gauges.

When the NRC’s inspection is completed, the results will be made available to the public.

When you think of the NRC’s role in emergency preparedness, nuclear power plants probably come first to mind. While we certainly pay a lot of attention to commercial reactors, we also oversee emergency plans for plants that make nuclear fuel, permanently shut down plants and sites that store spent power plant fuel.

Yet another area of emergency preparedness we oversee involves research and test reactors.

These “non-power” reactors don’t generate electricity, but they contribute to almost every field of science. These small facilities play important roles in research, testing and education on college campuses, and at government agencies across the country.

The NRC requires research and test reactors to maintain the same sort of emergency plans that large commercial reactors do. The NRC requires that these plans include, among other things, how to assess and classify abnormal events, how to respond to events, and how to establish planning zones for environmental monitoring and protective actions if needed.

The plans are very simple for research and test reactors since they are relatively small compared to a commercial nuclear power reactor. In fact, the largest NRC-regulated research reactor is about 75 times smaller than the smallest commercial reactor. Research and test reactor planning zones range in size from the building the reactor sits in to only about a half-mile radius around the facility – much smaller than the 10-mile emergency zone for power reactors.

Research and test reactors are required to train personnel and hold emergency preparedness exercises, and the NRC routinely inspects the plans to make sure they meet our requirements.

Should anything ever occur at these small non-power reactors, the NRC makes sure the facility staff know what to do and how to react to make sure people living or working or attending school in the area are safe, and that the environment is not impacted. It’s just another facet of what the NRC does on a large scale every day.

Anything radioactive makes for good drama – or so many television and movie scriptwriters believe. “China Syndrome” in 1979 and “Silkwood” in 1983 are just two examples of movies with nuclear themes – reactors in one and materials in another. But how accurate are Hollywood’s depictions of radioactive substances?

Often they’re off the mark by a lot.

But there are times when writers and producers check with us on whether a script or scene is close enough to reality for Hollywood’s purposes. This year we’ve gotten questions about the sequence of a reactor meltdown and its aftermath. We walked through the scenario in generalities, careful not to reveal security details or other protected information. We feel it’s in our best interest to have whatever accuracy is possible in a Hollywood production.

That being said, entertainment is not a documentary and often facts don’t get in the way of a good tale.

For instance, the 2005 season of the pressure-packed “24” had a “black box” that could remotely operate all U.S. nuclear power plants via the Internet. It made for thrilling TV, but this is what we said about that plot point: There is no such black box or suitcase for controlling nuclear power plants. Control systems at the plants are not accessible via the Internet.

“NCIS: Los Angeles” also aired an episode titled “Empty Quiver,” during which bad guys hijack a Department of Energy Secure Transport. One of our NRC experts saw the show and had first-hand knowledge of these vehicles. This is what he said about it: “The only similarity between what was shown on TV and reality is that in both cases the transport vehicles each had 18 wheels!”

In another example, the 2006 season of “West Wing” featured the government response to a nuclear power plant accident that in many – but not all ways – was fairly accurate. This is what the NRC said at the time: The NRC understands the writers’ literary license in assigning roles and responsibilities to various characters in the show, but the NRC would be the federal coordinating agency in any event involving a nuclear power plant.

So what’s the bottom line? When the plot synopsis reads “nuclear,” feel free to enjoy it, but don’t confuse fiction with fact.