ABACC TECHNICAL SUPPORT FROM MEMBER STATES

According to the Bilateral Agreement between the Republic of Argentina and Federative Republic of Brazil for the Exclusively Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy (Article XVI), \"The Parties shall make their technical capabilities available to ABACC in support of its activities\". In fact ABACC does not have its own laboratories but works with the capability existing in both countries and can also count on the technical cooperation with other organisms and countries. The existing interaction of ABACC with Brazil and Argentina, independently of using services provided by the countries on a commercial basis, gives the technical support related to safeguards applications and techniques. These cooperative activities have shown to be very important and useful in facilitating ABACC to play its role. Technical cooperation agreements with CNEN (Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission), ARN (Argentinean Nuclear Regulatory Authority) and CNEA (Argentinean Atomic Energy Commission), formalize those activities. This effort has offered to the technical community from the two countries some very interesting technological challenges, sometimes (for specific facilities) never used before as a safeguard methodology. Because of the Quadripartite Agreement, involving both countries and ABACC and the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to which ABACC and IAEA have to perform joint inspections, the techniques must be accepted also by the IAEA. As a result, many of those technical cooperation activities are developed in close relationship to the IAEA. The inclusion of the technical cooperation of other international organizations and countries, participating with technical (and in some case even financial) resources is also a fact that has helped this development allowing ABACC to show its credibility to international organizations and other countries. In this paper, the main projects developed in this technical cooperation in the fields of Destructive Analysis, Bulk Swipe Sample Analysis, Non Destructive Assay, Containment and Surveillance and Training are presented. These projects are the ones of immediate priority for ABACC, aiming at the solution of specific safeguards problems, already existing in both countries, and, have been discussed and tested thus permitting the person-power optimization and the decreasing of safeguards effort in the ABACC regional system.