Design Information Verification for Nuclear Safeguards Institute for Nuclear Materials Management Annual Meeting 2009 DESIGN INFORMATION VERIFICATION FOR NUCLEAR SAFEGUARDS

ABSTRACT A critical aspect of international safeguards activities performed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is the verification that facility design and construction (including upgrades and modifications) do not create opportunities for nuclear proliferation. These Design Information Verification activities require that IAEA inspectors compare current and past information about the facility to verify the operator's declaration of proper use. The actual practice of DIV presents challenges to the inspectors due to the large amount of data generated, concerns about sensitive or proprietary data, the overall complexity of the facility, and the effort required to extract just the safeguards relevant information. Planned and anticipated facilities will (especially in the case of reprocessing plants) be ever larger and increasingly complex, thus exacerbating the challenges. This paper reports the results of a workshop held at the Idaho National Laboratory in March 2009, which considered technologies and methods to address these challenges. The use of 3D Laser Range Finding, Outdoor Visualization System, Gamma-LIDAR, and virtual facility modeling, as well as methods to handle the facility data issues (quantity, sensitivity, and accessibility and portability for the inspector) were presented. The workshop attendees drew conclusions about the use of these techniques with respect to successfully employing them in an operating environment, using a Fuel Conditioning Facility walk-through as a baseline for discussion. INTRODUCTION The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) implements nuclear safeguards and verifies that countries are compliant with their international nuclear safeguards agreements, pursuant to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). One of the key provisions in the INFCIRC/153 IAEA Model Safeguards Agreement is the requirement for the country to provide nuclear facility design and operating information to the IAEA, relevant to safeguarding the facility. [1] This provides the opportunity for the IAEA to verify the safeguards relevant features of the facility and to periodically ensure that those features have not changed. The design information is initially conveyed from the facility operator through the national authorities (State System of Accounting for, and Control of Nuclear Material -SSAC) to the IAEA using the completed Design Information Questionnaire (DIQ) and updated as required by written addendum. Design information examination (DIE) of declared information is carried out by IAEA safeguards inspectors to design a safeguards approach for each specific facility. IAEA safeguards inspector