Safeguards at U.S. Centrifuge Enrichment Facilities

The U.S. is in the process of licensing 2 large centrifuge plants, the LES National Enrichment Facility and the USEC American Centrifuge Plant, which are scheduled to come on line within the next 3 years; and France is planning another such facility, the George Besse II, in the same time frame. IAEA already safeguards gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plants in two other nuclear weapon states, the U.K. and China, as well as enrichment plants in Japan, The Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina. The United States placed the LES National Enrichment Facility and the USEC Lead Cascade Facility on the Eligible Facilities List in 2004. It seems likely that the French gas centrifuge plant will be added to their eligible facilities list. The U.S. and France are, by the terms of their technology transfer agreements with Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K., obligated to make their best endeavors to have the LES National Enrichment Facility and the George Besse II plants selected for inspection by the IAEA. At this writing, the IAEA has not made a decision regarding selection of the U.S. facilities for inspection, but the expectation is that one or more facilities will be selected eventually. Safeguarding large enrichment plants involves significant inspection resources, which would not serve a direct nonproliferation purpose in the nuclear weapons states. The Agency has recently proposed a generic strengthened safeguards approach to enrichment plants; when a new plantspecific approach is developed, it should use new technologies to improve effectiveness and efficiency. The issue of protection of sensitive information is also of critical importance. Reducing Agency inspection effort could be addressed by designing an effective safeguards approach that relies on, inter alia, remote monitoring, authentication of installed instrumentation such as load cells, cylinder tracking, and mailbox declarations. Reliance on installed instrumentation and remote monitoring would allow for random, less frequent, inspections. The U.S. intends to work with the IAEA and other technology holder states to identify an effective safeguards regime with the objective of maximizing inspector efficiency.