Nuclear Safeguards Monitoring with Spaceborne SAR

To date, the IAEA has relied primarily on the use of high resolution optical data for nuclear safeguards monitoring, but with the recent availability of high resolution, polarimetric spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery, there was interest to assess the performance of SAR to meet monitoring requirements. To assess the performance of SAR for nuclear facility monitoring, RADARSAT-2 SAR data was acquired over the Pickering nuclear generating station in Canada and the Ranger Mine in Australia. Analysis of the Pickering data indicated that relevant facility features could be readily detected, but the detection of other features, such as reactor buildings, was difficult due to the physical shape of the buildings. In the case of the Ranger Mine, feature detection was sensitive to radar polarization and radar look-direction. The role of sensor integration, namely RADARSAT-2 and TerraSAR-X, and the use of SAR data in the Physical Model was outlined.