TIMELINESS AND INTEGRATED SAFEGUARDS

With safeguards moving in new directions, this is a good time to revisit timeliness issues. Current timeliness goals were not intended to be mechanistic, and were set on a provisional basis - it was foreseen that new goals would be developed to help improve the effectiveness of safeguards. Meeting current timeliness goals is expensive. In 1997 the direct cost of IAEA interim inspections (including timeliness inspections) was two-and-a-half times that of physical inventory verifications (PIVs). Now it can be seen that strengthened safeguards will marginalise some timeliness considerations. Remote monitoring will mean that factors other than a predetermined frequency will spark interim inspections. Assurance will be enhanced by safeguards-strengthening measures to detect misuse of declared facilities. And it is enhanced by facility-specific factors such as modest inventory and flows and material being in item form. Consideration of all these factors together leads to the conclusion that inspection frequency should be more broadly based than simple application of timeliness.