Glass Seal for Safeguards

IAEA safeguards regime utilizes tamper-indicating seals in order to maintain continuity of knowledge and significantly reduce the need for complex verification measurements and to complement and/or reduce expensive surveillance installations. A safeguards sealing system is always comprised of the containment enclosing the nuclear or other material to be safeguarded, the bonding element or component for applying the seal (e.g. a fiber optic loop, or a metal wire) and the seal itself. All three of these components must be examined in order to verify that the sealing system has fulfilled its function. The identity component of the seal body allows IAEA staff to authenticate and check for tampering. Some of the well known active seals are the VACOSS and EOSS seals and some of the well known passive seals the Cobra and simple metal seals. The IAEA is considering new materials and technologies to update its ‘work horse’ passive metal seal, the 40+ year-old CAPS (Double Cap Metal Seal). This paper describes the efforts and approach for a new inexpensive passive glass seal, which can be verified in-situ.