Study Of Pastel User’S Behaviour During The Declaration Process, Illustration Of How A Web Portal Dedicated To The French Additional Protocol Improves Safeguards

The Additional Protocol to the Safeguards Agreement between France, the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and the IAEA aims to further enhance nuclear non-proliferation by strengthening the effectiveness and improving the efficiency of the Agency's safeguards system. Indeed, IAEA has to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material and the absence of undeclared activities, with Non-Nuclear Weapons States (NNWS). Hence, France declares activities with NNWS such as research and development, teaching in higher education or fuel cycle equipment manufacturing. In 2014, the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN), which is the French Technical Support Organisation (TSO), decided to develop a web portal dedicated to the Additional Protocol declaration called PASTEL. Its purpose is to gain in efficiency and enhance this declaration. This portal is used since 2015 and is continuously improved. Understanding the issues related to the user's behaviour during the statement allows to ensure the completeness and correctness of the declaration and increases the declaration’s efficiency. Therefore, this paper quantifies and evaluates the time spent on the web portal by registrants and IRSN analysts. For both, PASTEL saves a lot of time, showing the benefits of deploying a web portal for this declaration. This time saved by IRSN analysts is now used for the open source investigation to enhance the completeness of the French Additional Protocol declaration. In the future, the purpose is to ease the declaration process and to consider the development of an automatic method based on open source mining.