Technologies that can enforce the nuclear safeguards regime

Enforcing the nuclear safeguards regime is essential to warrant no peaceful nuclear materials, establishments and devices are ever diverted or transformed into forms that make them amenable for military uses. Classical enforcement techniques have relied on international inspectors' assessment of the facility in question, checked against what facility operators would provide as their own reporting. Under existing safeguarding tactics errors can still occur due to systematic measurement discrepancies or random measurement errors. Certain tolerance levels leave room for reasonable errors to exist. However, the previous regulatory regime set forth by the IAEA does not account for materials which can be recovered from production machinery, waste tanks, or losses to the environment, even when containment, surveillance measures and remote monitoring are well fixed into place. In this paper, we briefly review the main highlights of the nuclear safeguards regime and propose technologies which can offer continuous online monitoring and reporting for nuclear facilities, materials, and devices which are fixed in place or others that are in transit on their ways to storage, processing and/or handling sites.