INVENTORY OF NUCLEAR MATERIALS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

The crisis situations for nuclear materials in nuclear facilities are provided for in the French regulation, as the decree of 12 May 1981 specifies that \" In any circumstance, the Ministry of Industry can order a physical inventory of the materials and its comparison with the accountancy records \". Such an inventory can be ordered in facilities holding category I nuclear materials, in case of a theft, a blackmail to a theft or a suspicion of materials theft for example. The operators must be able to provide an answer to the question \"can the stolen materials come from my facility ?\" within a few hours. To test the organization set in the concerned sites, at the operators and competent authority levels respectively, five exercises of increasing complexity have already been carried out. These exercises have permitted the validation of the procedures written by the concerned operators, the composition of the various crisis centers as well as the methodology for carrying out an inventory in case of emergency and the use of protected communication means. The authority crisis center includes members of the competent Authority and staff members of the IPSN, acting as the technical support body of the Authority. This center is in charge of the national managing of the operations of inventory in case of a real crisis. It is in relation with one or several site crisis centers to give the operators orders or instructions and obtain information about the inventory. The site crisis center is the interface between the authorities and the facility crisis center. The operations of inventory are carried out from the roughest checking to the finest ones : checking of fences, alarms, counting of articles, checking of seals, identification, weighing, rough then fine measurements (as the substitution by a dummy article must be considered). To be efficient during the first hours of the crisis, the authority crisis center must have data bases at the disposal of its experts. The various information contained in these documents concern physical protection and accountancy of the nuclear materials detained by the site and the concerned facility.