Justification for Acquiring an Automated State Accounting System

There are many countries looking for a clean sustainable energy supply. A number of countries have decided that Nuclear Power is the best way to go. Choosing Nuclear Power as a source of energy brings about additional country obligations. One of these is the establishment of an accounting system at the government level to monitor the peaceful use of nuclear material within their country. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has published guidelines to assist emerging nuclear power countries with this process. Data that needs to be collected by the government to properly monitor nuclear material activity and report those activities to the IAEA are included in those guidelines. Some countries have concluded that a simple data collection methodology will work well enough to meet government needs and IAEA reporting requirements. Overtime, they find that more effort and money is spent maintaining nonsearchable spreadsheets, word processor documents and hard-copies. This type of documentation makes it difficult to perform adequate facility inspections, IAEA error free reporting and meeting country to country treaty requirements. This paper will address the advantages to acquiring an Automated State Accounting System. There are many aspects to data collection, processing and maintains that most new nuclear power countries do not think or know about when creating a data collection methodology. This paper will address those components and explain why more effort and cost should be expended in the beginning and not over the lifetime of the nuclear program.