Near Real Time Accountability (NRTA) of actinides at high accuracy in reprocessing plants hasbeen a long sought-after goal in the safeguards community. Achieving this goal is hampered by thedifficulty of making accurate measurements in the reprocessing environment, equipment cost, andimpact to plant operations. Thus the design of future reprocessing plants requires an optimizationof different approaches. The Separations and Safeguards Performance Model (SSPM), developed atSandia National Laboratories, was used to evaluate two different NRTA strategies in a UREX+reprocessing plant. The first strategy examined the incorporation of additional actinidemeasurements of internal plant vessels, while the second examined integration with processmonitoring data. Preliminary results show that the first strategy can improve the timeliness ofdetection of abnormal events; however, the overall measurement uncertainty will increase and thecost and burden to the operator is expected to be significant. The second strategy can provide thesame benefit using instrumentation that is already part of the plant design. The modeling results forthe two different NRTA options under various material loss conditions are discussed.
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