Year
1994
Abstract
In recent years, public interest regarding IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards effectiveness has partially shifted to detection of undeclared nuclear facilities. Nevertheless, important segments of the public remain vitally interested in whether international safeguards would be able to reliably and definitively detect diversion of bomb quantities of plutonium or highly enriched uranium from \"bulk handling\" facilities. There now exists a sizable body of unclassified technical reports, based on experimental results over many years, written by various experts, describing actual capabilities and limitations of safeguards techniques and systems, which collectively lead to definitive evaluations of technical safeguards effectiveness. For a large-scale operation of spent fuel reprocessing, plutonium fuel fabrication, or gas centrifuge uranium enrichment, an undisputable conclusion is that international safeguards systems would be unable to reliably and definitively detect the diversion in a one-year period of a significant quantity of plutonium or enriched uranium; moreover, diversion of many significant quantities per year (from such an operation) would have negligible probability of definitive detection if conducted in accordance with particular diversion scenarios. To properly inform the public and government agencies, reports on technical effectiveness of international safeguards should incorporate these basic conclusions.