AN APPROACH TO IMPLEMENTING PRECISION AND ACCURACY GOAL POLICY

It is recognized that many of the nuclear material matrices assayed by non-destructive techniques do not match the standards or the unknown variability of the items can not be quantified. Producing certified standards for residue materials, for example, is very costly. Working standards have been used upon occasion but they are often not a perfect match for all of the material in a category. To establish precision and accuracy goals for MC&A purposes, it is unwise to use only measurement control information from the measurement of standards. Goals, based upon repeat measurement data of product matrices, benefits operating facilities by providing realistic measurement uncertainties for inventory difference explanations and facilitates the determination of limits-of- error for inventory items. This paper discusses an approach to defining precision and accuracy goals that provide a more realistic program for establishing limits-of-error used for MC&A decisions.