International Target Values - Looking Forward And Lessons Learned

Under the State-level concept, nuclear material accountancy (NMA), which support the detection of nuclear material from declared nuclear fuel cycle (NFC) facilities is reaffirmed as a measure of fundamental importance. The effectiveness of safeguards verifications in support of NMA depends, on the one hand of the quality of the NFC facility operators’ accounting and measurement system and, on the other hand, of the performance of the inspectors’ non-destructive assay (NDA) in-field measurement and of destructive analysis (DA) of nuclear material samples. In order to assess and compare the quality of safeguards measurements, a set of uncertainty values for destructive analysis (DA) was proposed by the European Safeguards Research & Development Association (ESARDA) Working Group for Destructive Analyses (WGDA), and the first values were published in 1979. The WGDA released three subsequent updates, and in 1993, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published the ITV derived primarily from safeguards measurement data collected in NFC facilities all over the world. Two subsequent updates, progressively extending the ITV scope, were released by the IAEA in 2000 and 2010 following the same approach. The ITV-2020 project, whose objective is to issue the next set of updated and expanded ITV had to face a number of challenges related to the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown conditions at the IAEA and in partner Member State institutions. Fortunately, the proactive and early engagement of international stakeholders and the lessons learned from virtual meetings led the authors to consider a more continuous approach to ITV that would be more dynamic and collaborative, more resilient to resource disruptions, and more adaptive to changes in international communication culture and platforms.