SAFEGUARDS PERFORMANCE MODELING OF REPROCESSING

The design of future fuel cycle facilities faces a number of political and economical challenges. Increasing nuclear material safeguards standards may raise the bar on the design of safeguards systems. The Safeguards Performance Model developed at Sandia National Laboratories is a tool for optimizing materials accountability within a reprocessing plant. The model simulates both process monitoring and materials accountability measurements from instrumentation packages. The model has been used to investigate advanced accountancy concepts, test the effect of newly developed instrumentation, and perform diversion scenario analysis. One of the goals of the modeling effort is to design in advanced accountancy systems while at the same time keeping costs optimized. This paper proposes a new materials accountancy regime that uses additional sampling points within the plant to allow true near real-time accountability of plutonium. New instrumentation that may enable this new regime will also be discussed.