Over the past several years, I have provided support to the US ANSI N14 Executive Committee. N14, as it is called by its members and associates, is more formally known as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Accredited Standards Committee N14 on Packaging and Transportation of Radioactive and Non-Nuclear Hazardous Material. Rick Rawl was the Chair of N14 and had been for many years; Mark Hawk was the N14 Secretary. Both Rawl and Hawk were members of the ORNL Transportation Technologies Group that I had joined in November of 2003 and that was based at the NTRC. Rawl had retired a few years earlier and had opted to remain N14 Chair into retirement. In November of 2012, I learned that Rawl had decided to step down from that position in an attempt to lesson his retirement workload. The immediate succession plan was for Hawk, who had served as Secretary for years, to be balloted for N14 Chair. However, in December of 2012, Hawk decided to retire and also decided that he was not interested in taking on the role of N14 Chair in retirement. In view of my work with the N14 Executive Committee supporting both Rawl and Hawk, I was nominated and subsequently balloted for the N14 Chair. Because I had worked relatively anonymously with the executive committee, I was somewhat surprised by the overwhelming support I received during the balloting process. In early March I was installed as the N14 Chair.
Becoming the Chair of the ANSI N14 Committee was somewhat of a shock to the system. I had not appreciated all the efforts that Rick Rawl had put forth during the years he served as N14 Chair, but I certainly do now. The first and foremost responsibility of the N14 Chair is to ensure that our standards are kept up to date and that our writing subcommittees remain viable and active. N14 currently has six active standards developed by six different subcommittees. In December of 2012, the revised N14·1–2012 Standard, ‘Uranium Hexafluoride – Packaging for Transport’, was published. This was the first standard N14 had published since 2001. Subsequent to my taking the helm, N14·7–2013, ‘Guidance for Packaging Type A Quantities of Radioactive Materials’, and N14·36–2013, ‘Measurement of Radiation Level and Surface Contamination for Packages and Conveyances’, have both been published. To be clear, the credit for getting these published rests squarely with the subcommittees that developed them and also with our new N14 Secretary, Ron Natali. However, I do take great pride in the fact that the N14 mission is back on track and that we are moving forward. As mentioned, three new standards have been published, another has been balloted recently and will be published soon, and the other two are moving forward. I hope to report by the end of 2014 that all N14 standards will have been initially published or updated in the past two years.
Other N14 Chair duties include making sure that all subcommittees are viable – only one is currently a challenge in this area (but we are making progress), and responding to requests for clarification regarding the published standards. Another area I am required to work on is ensuring that our operating procedures are in full compliance with the ANSI Essential Requirements. I assumed that a well established organization like ANSI would have a set of operating rules that would be stable and not vary much from year to year. However, I was wrong. It turns out the good folks at ANSI headquarters make significant changes to the Essential Requirements on an annual basis. It is then incumbent on all committees under the ANSI umbrella to make corresponding changes in their operating procedures to ensure compliance. Along with the N14 Secretary, I am currently in the process of revising the N14 Operating Procedures. If the changes are substantive, they will require approval by the N14 Committee through balloting.
Finally, ANSI will periodically audit its accredited standards committees to ensure that the committees’ operating procedures, as well as the ANSI Essential Requirements, are all being met. Over the past decade, N14 has been audited twice and has not fared particularly well during these audits. The last one took over two-and-a-half years to be fully resolved, and during that time N14 was not allowed to publish any other standards. The audit concern was a major impetus in the recruiting of our current N14 Secretary, Ron Natali. Ron has been involved with the shipment of radioactive material for most of his career, first at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and since retirement through his consulting firm. This background, and Ron’s willingness to participate, would have been enough to qualify him for he job, but Mr Natali has a secret weapon that makes him the perfect person for this task – he is an NQA-1 Certified Lead Auditor. Therefore, Ron brings with him that auditor’s questioning attitude to all of his N14 activities – I think of him as our audit insurance. I know that Ron looks at every N14 transaction, thinks about how an audit could be used to investigate that activity and then determines what documentation needs to be filed for easy retrieval whenever the next inevitable audit takes place.
I am also active with the International Organization for Standardization, Technical Committee 85, Subcommittee 5, Working Group 4 on Transportation of Radioactive Material (ISO/TC85/SC5/WG4). As the N14 Chair, the USA’s vote on standards developed by WG4 now resides with me. I do not take this responsibility lightly and look forward to working with this group as we move these important international standards forward.
I believe that the role that standards play in ensuring the safe and secure transport of radioactive material cannot be underestimated. Good standards also provide the benefit of consistent expectations and, in some cases, regulations. As recent events have shown, those of us in the Nuclear Industry live in a glass house, so we do not want to give anyone rocks to lob our way. I am hoping that, as N14 Chair, I will do my small part to further these regulations, both domestically in the USA and internationally through the ISO/TC85/SC5/WG4, and thereby help to ensure that the remarkable safety record our industry has continues well into the future. I hope our readership shares my interest and passion for standardization and I trust you will let me know if there are any areas of standardization that you believe need to be addressed.
Thanks
Matt
Matthew R. FeldmanEditor[email protected]