THE NEW OPTIC FIBER ELECTRONIC SEAL : FO-IRES

At the request of the French Support Program to the IAEA Safeguards, the Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) initiated the development of a new-generation electronic seal called IRES in 1998. The main users’ requirements were that the seal should detect any unauthorized attempt at tampering, that all events should be time stamped, authenticated and recorded in a non-volatile memory, that batteries should provide at least two years’ service life in regular service conditions and that the seal should be remotely interrogated trough both a wire link and a radio link. IRSN and its industrial partner SAPHYMO have developed the IRES seal to meet these requirements. It can store 1600 events: initialization, attachment, detachment, verification, sealing wire opening and closing, housing opening, battery status changes and temperature changes. The IRESMANAG application based on an MS-ACCESS database enables the seal operation and supports data transfer to the database in the polling PC. The first version of IRES used an electric sealing wire and was well adapted for use in high-level radiation locations. In 2001, it was decided to develop a new version retaining the features of the existing seal but based on an optic fiber sealing wire. Moreover, the radio module was removed from the seal and constitutes an independent device with its own battery. This device is easy to customize for every region in the world. Seals may be grouped together (up to 32 seals per group). Only one radio module is required to poll the whole group, which is a cost effective enhancement over the previous version that included a radio module in every seal. Lastly, the management software is the same for both IRES seals (electric wire or fiber optic) and deals with groups of seals. This paper will focus on the IRES fiber optic seal and on the new potential offered by the IRESMANAG application.