Performance Assurance – Safeguards Challenges in Managing Program Effectiveness in Changing Facilities and Missions

Sustaining the vision as a Center of Excellence for Strategic Materials Management at the K-Area Complex (KAC) represents a significant safeguards challenge for the Nuclear Materials Management Department (NMM) at Savannah River Site (SRS). A changing business environment further challenges the organization’s Road to Excellence where flexibility and adaptability have become key demands from the Department of Energy (DOE) customer in the pursuit of improvement technologies that meet domestic and international safeguards requirements. Since the beginning of the modernization of the containment surveillance safeguards function at SRS in 1997, Washington Savannah River Company (WSRC) has teamed with DOE in advancing material surveillance technology, where the KAC Continuous Item Monitoring Surveillance (CIMS) System required new, innovative approaches to material surveillance techniques. DOE has directed NMM to pursue the next exponential change - eliminate long standing material surveillance controls in the form of two-person rule, daily administrative checks and physical inventories. This paper will examine DOE’s recent direction to depart from such long-standing administrative practices, its implications and the changes necessary to accommodate CIMS end-user applications and still meet DOE Order compliance. It is expected that the automated alternatives may serve as the basis for a revised set of published DOE policies and requirements that will address automated methodologies for other facilities and organizations that are also pursuing similar less labor-intensive material surveillance alternatives. Furthermore, the paper will outline the next steps in the modernization of NMM material surveillance techniques, with a strategy for CIMS and an approach for measuring safeguards program effectiveness.