INTEGRATING PROLIFERATION RESISTANCE INTO THE DESIGN OF CENTRIFUGE FACILITIES

The current international safeguards practices for gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facilities can be significantly improved by developing and implementing new approaches for integrating proliferation resistance into the design of new facilities. This paper proposes that identifying and incorporating certain features into the design of gas centrifuge facilities will improve proliferation resistance, reduce the overall costs of providing safeguards, and increase the acceptance of safeguards practices by the operators of the facilities. To facilitate this approach at the facility level, this paper discusses an integrated proliferation resistance analysis (IPRA) process, which could be used to systematically analyze a facility’s processes, systems, equipment, structures and management controls to ensure that all relevant proliferation scenarios that could result in unacceptable consequences have been identified, evaluated, and mitigated. This approach, which can be institutionalized into the country’s regulatory structure, is similar to the way in which facilities are licensed to operate safely and the manner in which they are monitored through audits and incident reporting to ensure continued safe operations. This paper also provides an example of a simplified system that could be developed by utilizing the IPRA process during the design of a gaseous centrifuge enrichment plant (GCEP). The GCEP Attributes Monitoring System (GAMS) discussed in this paper could be used to provide the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with assurance that a centrifuge plant is not operating outside its declared envelope.