Year
2007
Abstract
An IAEA Technical Meeting on Techniques for IAEA Verification of Enrichment Activities identified \"smart tags\" as a technology that should be assessed for tracking and locating UF6 cylinders. Although there is vast commercial industry working on RFID systems, the vulnerabilities of commercial products are only beginning to emerge. Most of the commercially off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID systems operate in very narrow frequency bands, making them vulnerable to detection, jamming and tampering and also presenting difficulties when used around metals (i.e. UF6 cylinders). Commercial passive RFID tags have short range, while active RFID tags that provide long ranges have limited lifetimes. Considering the shortcomings of commercial RFID systems, in their current form, they do not offer a promising solution for continuous monitoring and tracking of UF6 cylinders. In this paper, key challenges faced by commercial RFID systems for monitoring UF6 cylinders are identified, and an ultra-wideband approach for tag/reader communications that addresses most of the identified challenges for IAEA safeguards applications is introduced.