Year
2003
Abstract
The French regulations concerning protection and control of nuclear materials state that the Institute for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN) is in charge of centralizing the accounting data delivered by French operators holding nuclear materials. To achieve this goal, IRSN manages a real-time accounting system which collects and processes every year about 70,000 vouchers corresponding to coded declarations of inventory changes in French installations. These vouchers are transmitted every day by Licensees authorized by the French Authority (HFD, High Civil Servant in charge of Defense questions at the Ministry of Industry) to hold significant amounts of nuclear materials. IRSN is also in charge of collecting and analyzing annual declarations established by more than 600 small owners of nuclear materials who are exempt from licensing. All these declarations are processed into a relational database, used to provide the French Authority with up-to-date reports and analyses at its request, to support on-field inspections and to elaborate and transmit EURATOM declarations to the European Commission on behalf of French operators. Since the volume of incoming data continues to increase, the use of specific analysis tools and processes is a necessary step to allow verification and efficient control of operators declarations, especially when they issue from complex installations. This paper describes the accounting analysis work performed at IRSN to check and control accounting declarations and verify that French operators fulfill their legal obligations. It provides an overview of the regulatory context dealing with the protection and control of nuclear materials in France and then focuses on an inspection methodology developed and applied by the inspectors of the French domestic safeguards in IRSN National Nuclear Material Accounting Group. It finally demonstrates how this work helps strengthen the efficiency of nuclear materials control in France.