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Modern nuclear facilities will have significant process monitoring capability for their operators. These systems will also be used for domestic safeguards applications, which has led to research over new diversion-detection algorithms. Curiously missing from these efforts are verification and validation data sets. A tri-laboratory project to locate the existing data sets and recover their data has yielded three major potential sources of data. The first is recovery of the process monitoring data of the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant, which now has a distributable package for algorithm developers. The second data set is extensive sampling and process data from Savannah River National Laboratory's F- and H-canyon sites. Finally, high fidelity data from the start-up tests at the Barnwell Reprocessing Facility is in recovery. This paper details the data sets and compares their relative attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Safeguards Envelope is a strategy to determine a set of specific operating parameters within which nuclear facilities may operate to maximize safeguards effectiveness without sacrificing safety or plant efficiency. This paper details advanced statistical techniques that will be applied to real plant process monitoring (PM) data from the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant (ICPP). In a simulation based on this data, multi-tank and multi-attribute correlations were tested against synthetic diversion scenarios. Kernel regression smoothing was used to fit a curve to the historical data, and multivariable, residual analysis and cumulative sum techniques set parameters for operating conditions. Diversion scenarios were created and tested, showing improved results when compared with a previous study utilizing only one-variable Z-testing. A brief analysis of the impact of the safeguards optimization on the rest of plant efficiency, criticality concerns, and overall requirements is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the stated goal of the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) to promote the development of a strengthened nuclear safeguards base - one with the potential to advance the secure and peaceful implementation of nuclear energy worldwide. To meet this goal, the initiative, among other things, has sought to develop a revitalized effort to ensure the continued availability of next generation safeguards professionals. Accordingly, this paper serves to outline the human capital building strategies taken by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in line with and supported by the NGSI. Various components are presented in detail, including INL's efforts directed at university outreach - in particular, the laboratory's summer internship program - along with the development of various innovative training programs and long-term oriented strategies for student professional development. Special highlights include a video training series, developed by INL in cooperation with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and other national laboratories, which sought to expose students and entry-level professionals to the concept and practice of international nuclear safeguards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodologies to determine the proliferation resistance (PR) of nuclear facilities often rely on either expert elicitation, a resource-intensive approach without easily reproducible results, or numeric evaluations, which can fail to take into account the institutional knowledge and expert experience of the nonproliferation community. In an attempt to bridge the gap and bring the institutional knowledge into numeric evaluations of PR, a survey was conducted of 33 individuals to find the relative importance of a set of 62 nonproliferation factors, subsectioned into groups under the headings of Diversion, Transportation, Transformation, and Weaponization. One third of the respondents were self-described nonproliferation professionals, and the remaining two thirds were from secondary professions related to nonproliferation, such as industrial engineers or policy analysts. The factors were taken from previous work which used multi-attribute utility analysis with uniform weighting of attributes and did not include institutional knowledge. In both expert and non-expert groups, all four headings and the majority of factors had different relative importance at a confidence of 95% (p=0.05). This analysis and survey demonstrates that institutional knowledge can be brought into numeric evaluations of PR, if there is a sufficient investment of resources made prior to the evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]