The role of the nuclear industry in advancing safeguards instrumentation

In times of high fossil fuel prices and climate change concerns, more and more countries evaluate nuclear energy as a sustainable addition to their energy portfolio. But increased interest in nuclear power also leads to increased concerns about the risk of diversion of nuclear materials or technologies for covert weapons programs. As a result, proliferation resistance of future nuclear fuel cycles is one of the key discussion points of current initiatives such as Generation IV International Forum (GIF), the International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO) and the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). Proliferation resistance has both intrinsic and extrinsic components. Intrinsic components refer to the design of the facilities and the types, chemical composition and physical characteristics of the materials used. Extrinsic features include the institutional barriers and the application of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, including the measurement methods and technologies employed in that context. Development of new safeguards instrumentation is critical for the IAEA to cope not only with technical issues (emergence of new technologies and the inevitable obsolescence of system components) but also to support policy-related advances, including safeguards policies, new approaches to safeguarding of excess material, and the introduction of new types of facilities to be safeguarded. These development projects usually involve IAEA staff and Member States and their Support Programs (MSSP) as well as research and development institutions and the private sector. Without a closely coordinated cooperation between all parties, the challenging task of timely developing, fielding, and maintaining new safeguards inspection tools over their complete lifecycle would not be possible. The role of the private sector is certainly focused on providing instrumentation and related services solutions, either developed by research and development institutions and then commercialized by industrial partners or developed within the private sector directly. Only rarely can the safeguards community rely on commercially or industrially developed solutions directly; generally, at least some custom development effort to meet safeguards requirements is needed. The instrumentation applied for safeguards varies broadly to cover different needs of safeguards authorities. The traditional safeguards instrumentation supports IAEA inspectors in their mission to verify the correctness of information about declared materials and facilities and includes measures to verify material composition and inventory as well as equipment that help establishing Continuity of Knowledge about non-diversion at safeguarded installations. With the implementation of the Additional Protocol (AP), the IAEA was further tasked to verify the completeness of declarations to ensure that safeguarded countries do not pursue covert nuclear weapons programs using undeclared nuclear materials and installations. Safeguards instrumentation used in the context of the AP has quite different requirements as it is not installed at declared installations but needs to be portable for inspector visit to undeclared sites. It also needs to be selected in the broader context of other safeguards measures used under the AP such as satellite imagery, open source analysis, etc. Use of safeguards instrumentation to accomplish the IAEA's verification mission is not new. The "traditional" measurement technologies for detection of declared materials consist of nondestructive analysis methods (NDA), which include primarily gamma and neutron measurement methods, unattended radiation monitoring systems (UMS), other measurement and monitoring systems, and containment and surveillance techniques. In this paper we will first outline the traditional Safeguards instrumentation approach and efforts that aim at verifying the correctness of information about declared nuclear materials and facilities, mainly including materials accountancy, materials composition measurements, and containment verification. We will discuss examples of why some of these methods have evolved into their present status. Some of the challenges to applying the present state of the art solutions will be highlighted. We will also discuss general requirements of safeguards instrumentation used for AP inspections and present a select number of technologies applicable to this field. Finally, we will conclude with our vision of what is needed for additional development in the near term. In particular, we will present the case of how the use of a building block approach developed by the industry (instrumentation and nuclear facility specialists) in cooperation with the safeguards community can make these next generation safeguards instruments and systems very cost effective to install and deploy.