Realizing Benefits From Technology for Inventory Monitoring

Over the years LANL has looked at several approaches to reducing the cost and impact of physical inventory while maintaining the same level of effectiveness in accountability currently required by the Department of Energy (DOE) orders. Technology advances have been acknowledged in the order where inventory extensions are allowed provided that effectiveness is assured. A limitation of the current approach is that an entire population (vault) must be under the enhanced surveillance for a facility to gain the inventory extension benefit. We are exploring methodologies for evaluating alternatives that may enable facilities to obtain more direct benefits from implementing advanced technologies. This will also help the technology developers to focus their efforts in areas that will provide maximum benefit. This work includes an implicit tradeoff between physical inventories, which are easily quantifiable, and confidence in containment and surveillance (C/S) measures. Physical inventories should never be eliminated because one cannot achieve 100% confidence in C/S measures, but we want to motivate responsible implementation of advanced technologies. To move forward with this successfully, the safeguards community will need to develop and agree to measures of effectiveness of containment and surveillance approaches. We will report a gaming experiment using 4 experts to independently assign effectiveness values to a hypothetical vault system.