Year
2018
Abstract
After International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approves the termination of safeguards on nuclear material declared by a State to be waste, the nuclear material is no longer subject to nuclear material accounting reports or IAEA inspections. Maximum concentration limits for termination of safeguards with respect to the primary waste forms generated within nuclear fuel cycles must be sufficiently conservative that termination of safeguards is not a weak link in the safeguards system. The concentration limits must also remain practical in order to ensure IAEA resources are used most effectively and efficiently to implement safeguards in the State. These termination limits should be technically-based while remaining objective and reasonable to implement by the State. In support of the original IAEA guidance on concentration limits for termination of safeguards prepared in the early 1990s, the U.S. developed an algorithm to estimate concentrations of nuclear material in waste that would make recovery of nuclear material from waste on which safeguards had been terminated at least as unattractive as undeclared production or diversion of similar nuclear material. In 2016 the IAEA sought technical input through a meeting of experts from selected member States to support updating its internal guidance on termination of safeguards. This 2016 effort included extending the guidance to cover additional types of nuclear material and waste forms. The experts in the 2016 meeting recommended that the IAEA limits should more clearly reflect the technical difficulty and level of effort required to recover nuclear material from the various waste types. The paper identifies and assesses the most likely techniques a State might use to recover nuclear material from the waste forms identified by the experts and determined how the safeguards termination algorithm could be revised to more accurately reflect the difficulty of recovering one significant quantity of nuclear material from these types of waste.