Safeguarding Future Large-Scale Plutonium Bulk Handling Facilities

摘要

The paper reviews the current status, advantages, limitations and probable future developments of material accountancy and of containment and surveillance. The major limitations on the use of material accountancy in applying safeguards to future plants arise from the uncertainty with which flows and inventories can be measured (0.5 to 1.0%), and the necessity to carry out periodical physical inventories to determine whether material has been diverted. The use of plant instrumentation to determine in-process inventories has commenced and so has the development of statistical methods for the evaluations of the data derived from a series of consecutive material balance periods. The limitations of accountancy can be overcome by increased use of containment and surveillance measures which have the advantage that they are independent of the operator's actions. In using these measures it will be necessary to identify the credible diversion paths, build in sufficient redundancy to reduce false alarm rates, develop automatic data recording and alarming. (Atomindex citation 11:545293)