New Developments For Extended Containment And Surveillance Of Safeguarded Materials In Geologicnew Developments For Extended Containment And Surveillance Of Safeguarded Materials In Geologic Repositoriesrepositories

The U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation-Proliferation Detection Basic R&D provides funding to early technology readiness level projects to ensure a new generation of technical tools are available to enhance or improve efficiency of safeguard’s methods. The focus area presented will be the development of tools that may be used to monitor special nuclear material placed into geologic repositories. Materials under safeguards that are placed into future geologic repositories will likely require monitoring well into the future. Safeguarding these materials introduces issue to be solved in terms of limited access, limited or no power, long durations, detection of material and intrusions at long distances, and data security. This presentation will discuss four related efforts aimed at solving existing and emerging problems in containment and surveillance. These efforts involve application of radiation sensors based upon scintillation and laser induced breakdown to detect radiation at a distance and extract measurements from long optical cables, and the detection of disturbance using seismic and EM sensors. Additionally, the use of quantum encryption may be used to detect human intrusion. All efforts ensure that electronics are accessible on the surface while the portion of the system entombed with the safeguarded material is fabricated from long lifetime components that are not intended to require maintenance.