Developing State-Level Safeguards Approaches: Reflections from Select Country Case Studies

The state-level concept, the foundation of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) efforts to transition to a more flexible and objectives-based safeguards system, continues to evolve. An essential feature of the concept is the development, for each state with a safeguards agreement in force, of a state-level approach (SLA) for safeguards implementation in the state—a customized approach that is objectives-based, information-driven, focused on issues of concern, and adaptable. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is engaged in an ongoing study where we are applying the principles of the state-level concept to several country cases to explore, through trial and error, various candidate methodologies that might be applicable to designing state-specific SLAs in practice. We selected our case studies to represent a variety of different fuel cycle capabilities and levels of IAEA safeguards authorities. This paper will discuss some of the key observations from our case studies, which we bounded to simply examining how the principles of the SLC might play out in allocating safeguards resources within an individual State; we did not address the issue of how it might affect the allocation of safeguards resources across States