Year
2012
Abstract
While nuclear suppliers currently track uranium hexafluoride (UF6) cylinders in various ways, for their own purposes, industry practices vary significantly. The NNSA Office of Nonproliferation and International Security’s Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) has begun a 5-year program to investigate the concept of a global monitoring scheme that uniquely identifies and tracks UF6 cylinders. As part of this effort, NGSI’s multi-laboratory team has documented the “life of a UF6 cylinder” and reviewed IAEA practices related to UF6 cylinders. Based on this foundation, this paper examines the functional requirements of a system that would uniquely identify and track UF6 cylinders. There are many considerations for establishing a potential tracking system. Some of these factors include the environmental conditions a cylinder may be expected to be exposed to, where cylinders may be particularly vulnerable to diversion, how such a system may be integrated into the existing flow of commerce, how proprietary data generated in the process may be protected, what a system may require in terms of the existing standard for UF6 cylinder manufacture or modifications to it and what the limiting technology factors may be. It is desirable that a tracking system should provide benefit to industry while imposing as few additional constraints as possible and still meeting IAEA safeguards objectives. This paper includes recommendations for this system and the analysis that generated them.