Safeguards at the Commercial Centrifuge Plant at Resende, Brazil

The IAEA and others have projected significant growth in nuclear power in coming decades. Most of which will be met by light water reactors, leading to an increasing demand for enrichment services. To meet this projected demand, new gas centrifuge plants are currently being built in the United States and France, Russia is using its enrichment plant at Angarsk to produce low-enriched uranium for export, and URENCO is expanding the capacity of its plants in Europe. Brazil is also constructing a commercial centrifuge plant at Resende, using Brazilian centrifuge technology. These developments pose new demands on the international safeguards system and underscore the need for the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative to help develop new technical measures and new approaches for safeguarding gas centrifuge enrichment plants. International safeguards are currently applied at centrifuge plants in Brazil, China, Germany, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In Brazil, safeguards are applied by both the IAEA and ABACC under the quadripartite agreement, which also covers Argentina. This paper will describe how ABACC is implementing and plans to implement safeguards at the Resende centrifuge plant in Brazil.