Developing an SSAC Self-Assessment Tool for Operators and Regulators

State Systems of Accounting for and Control of Nuclear Materials (SSAC) are organizational arrangements at a national level that enable countries to manage their nuclear materials and meet their international safeguards obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As such, SSAC performance can play an important role in determining how the IAEA allocates and spends its resources. For example, simple clerical errors in national reporting or unresponsive State Regulatory Authorities (SRAs) can cause IAEA inspectors to ask additional questions or schedule additional inspections, all of which create resource burdens for the Agency. Methods and tools have been identified that will help SRAs and operators supporting the SSAC to conduct effective self- assessments of their own safeguards performance and ensure that lessons learned inform improvements in organizational performance. Enabling an SSAC to understand its inefficiencies can help it allocate resources more effectively to better support IAEA safeguards implementation. In collaboration with the international consulting firm Environmental Resources Management and a U.S.-based nuclear fuel cycle facility, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is developing a framework for a future self-assessment tool for nuclear operators and regulators. This paper describes the effort to date, with an emphasis on how the team aligned the framework with relevant IAEA self-assessment tools.