Year
1998
Abstract
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is endeavouring to increase its safeguards efficiency by reducing its routine on-site inspection effort. It is expected that this could be achieved by applying unattended monitoring systems with remote interrogation of data. Such systems could comprise digital image surveillance, electronic sealing, and radiation monitoring. The most important requirement is the lossless acquisition of authentic safeguards data at IAEA headquarters. In addition, the transmitted data must be encrypted for confidentiality reasons. It is also desirable that the remote monitoring approach should be cost effective. There are technical and procedural issues to be solved such as the system reliability, the transmission and handling of large data volumes and the delay of image transmission. Under the German Support Programme to the IAEA a field test was carried out in a commercial dry storage facility for spent fuel. On a generic basis, the performance, potential and impacts of remote data transmission techniques and schemes were investigated. The paper describes the system setup and operation, the test results and draws conclusions.