A Continuous Measurement Safeguards Approach

The material control and accountability measurement program at Los Alamos National Laboratory has remained essentially the same for multiple decades. Criteria for the acceptance of verification and confirmation measurement results, the exact timing of measurement performance, and the measurement techniques have slowly evolved, but the safeguards program continues to perform measurements at the time of regularly scheduled inventories and material movements. Little safeguards inventory credit is given to the multitude of nondestructive assay measurements made by operations personnel during the normal course of operations. By taking safeguards credit for these measurements and instituting a random sampling procedure for determining the timing of additional measurements, LANL can both enhance safeguards and reduce the impact of these activities on programmatic work. This more efficient approach will provide increased assurance of the inventory and contribute to increased detection and assessment when implemented as part of an integrated material control and detection and assessment program. The authors propose one option for this continuous measurement approach. Demonstration of successful implementation at one NNSA facility could then be used to asses the viability of implementation of similar programs throughout the NNSA complex.