The development and maintenance of continuous unattended asset monitoring is integral to effective nuclear safeguards. Unattended monitoring can greatly reduce the frequency of on-site inspections; it is less intrusive to operators of nuclear facilities and less demanding on the limited number of inspectors. To design an effective unattended monitoring system, a clear understanding of the monitoring goals and requirements is necessary. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a history of developing and working with various unattended monitoring technologies. This paper will discuss unattended monitoring system characteristics and needs in the context of a systems approach to attribute monitoring for stored Special Nuclear Material (SNM). To maintain a balance between system cost and monitoring effectiveness where large numbers of items are being monitored, special consideration to communications robustness, infrastructure, and flexibility, power distribution and management, information security and the use of Comercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) equipment and international standards must be made. Among the characteristics being discussed, unattended monitoring systems should consider using redundant, self healing self managed communications networks, distributed back up power and low power techniques, plug and play type operation for extensibility, modular software, standards based, cross-platform, and secure sensor communications protocols incorporating data authentication and encryption, and being defense-in-depth aware to perform as a layer to other systems through rules based event notification and triggering mechanisms. Finally, the future needs of unattended storage monitoring will be considered. By addressing these needs now, they may be incorporated into current solutions to reduce future costs and increase the lifecycle of the system.
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