The nuclear-law reliability check under § 12b AtG (Atomgesetz, the German Atomic Energy Act) in conjunction with the Atomic Energy Reliability Assessment Ordinance (AtZüV) remains relevant for thousands of employees even after Germany’s nuclear phase-out: anyone who gains access to nuclear facilities or radioactive material in decommissioning projects, interim storage facilities or during the transport of nuclear fuel must be vetted by the authorities. The check is conducted in graduated categories, is carried out by the competent state (Land) authorities and is valid for five years.
Why the AtZüV remains relevant after the phase-out
With the shutdown of the last power reactors, the need for vetting has not disappeared — it has shifted. The decommissioning of the plants will stretch over decades, interim storage facilities for spent fuel elements and radioactive waste remain in operation, and nuclear fuel transports continue to take place. All of these fields of activity are personnel-intensive and rely heavily on external workers: demolition and decontamination specialists, radiation protection technicians, logistics staff, security guards, IT service providers. For all of them, the rule is: no access to the supervised area without a completed reliability check.
Legal basis and graduated categories
§ 12b AtG creates the statutory basis for vetting persons to protect against the theft or release of radioactive material and against disruptive acts and other interference by third parties. The details are governed by the AtZüV. Core elements of the system:
- Graduated vetting categories: The depth of the check depends on the security relevance of the access — from occasional entry to activities with direct access to nuclear fuel. The higher the category, the more extensive the official inquiries.
- State (Land) jurisdiction: The competent authority is the nuclear regulatory authority of the respective federal state. In practice, this means procedures, forms and processing times can differ by location — a relevant planning factor for service providers operating nationwide.
- Five-year validity: As with other official checks, the result is a snapshot with a long period of validity. What happens between two checks is not automatically captured by the procedure.
- Cooperation of the person concerned: The check requires their cooperation; without the necessary information and documents, the procedure does not begin.
The process from the company’s perspective
The application is regularly filed not by the person concerned but by the company or the facility operator intending to grant access. The authority then queries registers and security agencies and, as a result, communicates whether there are concerns about the person’s reliability. For the employer, the outcome is thus — as with the ZÜP under § 7 LuftSiG — largely opaque: it learns of the clearance or its denial, but not the underlying findings. The procedure’s duration of several weeks must be factored into deployment planning, especially for outage and decommissioning campaigns involving hundreds of contractor workers. Added to this is the need for repetition: after the five-year validity period expires, the check must be carried out again, and where security-relevant findings arise, a reassessment may be warranted earlier. Anyone coordinating many external workers needs solid deadline and documentation management for this.
The employer question: managing contractor personnel
This is where the real practical challenge lies. Operators and general contractors manage personnel they did not hire themselves, whose official vetting takes weeks and whose CVs no one has systematically verified. The AtZüV answers the sovereign access question — but not whether a welder’s qualification certificates are genuine, whether a subcontractor is economically entangled or sanctions-listed, or whether adverse findings have become public in the meantime. The employer may additionally carry out its own checks to the extent necessary for establishing and performing the engagement — with a structured, documented process rather than informal ad-hoc research. The fundamental distinction is covered in the article State security clearance vs. employer screening.
Recommended course of action
First, gain an overview of which roles and contractors within your area of responsibility are subject to the vetting obligation and how long the procedures actually take at your state authority. In parallel, establish a complementary, graduated screening programme for in-house and external personnel — CV verification, sanctions lists, adverse media — that bridges the waiting period and covers the years between official cycles. Indicium provides audit-proof software reports for this, with dated sources and human final review (Art. 22 GDPR); key terms are explained in our glossary. We would be happy to discuss what such a programme looks like for your industry in a demo.
This article provides general information and does not constitute legal advice.