Experience in comprehensive training of French Safeguards Inspectors

Since 1983, numerous French safeguards inspectors have been trained to make them able to fulfill their mission, which is defined by the French regulation namely to check in the field the reality of all the provisions declared taken by the operators to control and protect nuclear material against theft, loss or diversion. The training program has been formalized under quality assurance rules and covers various aspects: -the administrative phase whose purpose is to provide clearances in terms of confidential information access, qualification from the Competent Authority and sworn from the local Court of Justice -the regulation area which includes a basic learning of all the updated regulatory texts -the practical approach which consists of accompanying experienced and well trained inspectors in various types of facilities -the communication phase introduced more recently whose objective is to address the difficulty of managing the relation between operators and inspectors. It is designed through well known techniques such as NLP and role plays to help inspectors to do their duty in the facilities with efficiency. -the technical area which comprises theoretical topics such as statistics or more typically variance analysis used in LEMUF or confidence interval evaluations or instrumentation related topics. Depending on the level of knowledge and skills of the safeguards inspector, he may be enrolled in additional technical courses dealing with fuel cycle, plutonium and uranium chemistry, nonproliferation control among others. While a comprehensive structured system of training exists for new national safeguards inspectors, some efforts are devoted to maintain skill level for more experienced individuals. This concern is addressed through organizational provisions and more formal monthly debriefing meetings with the all age inspectorate. As a conclusion, the paper will suggest ideas that could be improvements in training personnel with regard to the training curriculum and the need to find quality indicators to be able to measure the performance and the efficiency of the implemented training system.