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U.S. Department of Energy
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ATTRIBUTE VERIFICATION SYSTEMS WITH INFORMATION BARRIERS FOR CLASSIFIED FORMS OF PLUTONIUM IN THE TRILATERAL INITIATIVE

Conference ·
OSTI ID:975779

A team of technical experts from the Russian Federation, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the United States has been working since December 1997 to develop a toolkit of instruments that could be used to verify plutonium-bearing items that have classified characteristics in nuclear weapons states. This suite of instruments is similar in many ways to standard safeguards equipment and includes high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometers, neutron multiplicity counters, gross neutron counters, and gross gamma-ray detectors. In safeguards applications, this equipment is known to be robust and authentication methods are well understood. However, this equipment is very intrusive, and a traditional safeguards application of such equipment for verification of materials with classified characteristics would reveal classified information to the inspector. Several enabling technologies have been or are being developed to facilitate the use of these trusted, but intrusive safeguards technologies. In this paper, these new technologies will be described.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Sponsoring Organization:
DOE
OSTI ID:
975779
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-01-5567; IAEA-SM-367/17/02
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English