Algorithm for Establishing Safeguards Termination Concentration Limits
- Y-12 National Security Complex, Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
This paper presents an algorithm for estimating the maximum concentration limits for terminating safeguards on nuclear materials. These limits are important because such material is no longer subject to accounting, reporting or inspections after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has approved the termination of safeguards on nuclear material declared by a State to be waste.Maximum concentration limits for different waste forms generated within nuclear fuel cycle facilities must be sufficiently conservative such that termination of safeguards does not become a weak link in the safeguards system. The concentration limits must also remain practical in order to ensure IAEA resources are used effectively and efficiently to implement safeguards in the State. These termination limits should be technically-based while remaining objective and reasonable to implement by the State. In support of the original IAEA guidance on concentration limits for termination of safeguards prepared in the early 1990s, the U.S. developed an algorithm to estimate concentrations that would make recovery of nuclear material from waste on which safeguards had been terminated at least as unattractive as undeclared production from uranium ore or diversion of similar nuclear material. In 2016, the IAEA sought technical advice from a meeting of experts from selected member States to support updating its internal guidance on termination of safeguards. Their recommendations included extending the guidance to consider additional waste forms. The experts in the 2016 meeting recommended that the IAEA limits should more clearly reflect the technical difficulty and level of effort required to recover nuclear material from the various waste forms. This paper identifies and assesses the most likely techniques a State might use to recover nuclear material from the waste forms identified by the experts and determines how the safeguards termination algorithm could be revised to more accurately reflect the difficulty of recovering one significant quantity of nuclear material from these waste forms.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant (Y-12), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- NA0001942
- OSTI ID:
- 1464619
- Report Number(s):
- IROS4787
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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