ESARDA Response to Research Needs in the new Safeguards Environment

The changing safeguards environment affects all the parties in the safeguards community: nuclear operators, research and development organisations, state authorities and regional and international safeguards organisations. ESARDA (as the European organisation for safeguards research and development) provides a forum to discuss new needs, to harmonise research and development, to propose solutions and to facilitate implementation of results. New policies, new tasks, new measurement and control strategies, new research and development programs are needed to fulfil the requirements of the new safeguards environment. ESARDA wishes to respond to these new challenges and identifies R&D tasks that should lead to concrete solutions. Some elements of the changing environments are the R&D challenges: the entry into force of the additional protocol; Integrated Safeguards; the role of Non-technical factors; the increased use of advanced technologies and large amounts of relevant but not always authenticated data. In this paper we will discuss the R&D challenges of these elements for measurement and monitoring technology, data treatment, decision support, fuel cycle aspects and safeguards strategies and the ESARDA response to these challenges.