Safeguards for the Decommissioning of Nuclear Facilities

The global nuclear fuel cycle has been growing for more than 50 years and many of its older facilities have been permanently shut down and some have completed decommissioning activities. As facilities transition from operational status into permanently shut down and into decommissioning activities, the safeguards activities performed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also change. The model path of this transition of facility status includes the ‘permanent shut down’ of the facility, where operations stop, but some nuclear material inventory remains; ‘closed down in a state of preservation’, where the nuclear material inventory has been removed, but the facility could be brought back into operation; ‘closed down in a state of decommissioning’, where equipment of the facility is being removed; and decommissioned for safeguards purposes, where all nuclear material and equipment essential to the operation of the facility has been removed or rendered inoperable. Some facilities will not follow the model because decommissioning of some areas of the facility will begin before all nuclear material is removed. The safeguards measures implemented by the IAEA will change with the quantity and location of the nuclear material and the type and status of the essential equipment. The paper presents recommendations developed by the authors for enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards for permanently shut-down and closed-down facilities.