Year
2002
Abstract
The State System of Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (SSAC) of Argentina has a permanent goal of improving its effectiveness and efficiency to better accomplished its own national objectives and to facilitate the application of international safeguards in a costeffective way. The introduction of new technologies in the Sac’s safeguards approaches is one way to achieve this goal. The Nuclear Regulatory Authority of Argentina (ARN) has identified some potential applications of remote monitoring and unattended technologies at certain nuclear installations. In recent years, some developments have been carried out to apply these technologies on selected Argentinean nuclear facilities to reduce ARN’s national safeguards inspection effort in the field while enhancing the control of nuclear materials flows and the operational status of nuclear facilities. These developments have the capability of remote data acquisition, monitoring, and authenticated data transmission from the facility to the ARN inspectorate headquarter. Some of them have been installed in pre-selected nuclear installations in the country for testing and evaluation. The Pilcaniyeu Gaseous Diffusion enrichment plant is one of the selected nuclear installations in which an unattended system was installed to control and detect authorized and potential non-authorized movement of nuclear material and enrichments cell status (operation-shut down). This development has been designed and installed for the exclusive purpose of confirming it non operational status for national safeguards purposes. The system architecture is based on an Autonomous Remote Sensor (SRA) capable of sensing temperature, movement, vibration and fiber optic parameters. These sensors are installed on the iron beams of the enrichment cells and wired to the central processing unit. All the data is collected by a data logger with the capability of local data review and remote data transmission.