Verification Experiment on the Downblending of High Enriched Uranium (HEU) at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant

Under the voluntary offer safeguards agreement between the US and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, Piketon, Ohio, was selected for the application of IAEA safeguards. Currently, the facility is in the process of downblending excess inventory of HEU to low enriched uranium (LEU) from US defense related programs for commercial use. An agreement was reached between the US and the IAEA that would allow the IAEA to conduct an independent verification experiment at the Portsmouth facility, resulting in the confirmation that the HEU was in fact downblended. The experiment provided an opportunity for the DOE laboratories to recommend solutions/measures for new IAEA safeguards applications. One of the measures recommended by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and selected by the IAEA, was a digital video surveillance system for monitoring activity at the HEU feed stations. This paper will describe the SNL implementation of the digital video system and its integration with the Load Cell Based Weighing System (LCBWS) from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The implementation was based on commercially available technology that also satisfied IAEA criteria for tamper protection and data authentication. The core of the Portsmouth digital video surveillance system was based on two Digital Camera Modules (DCM-14) from Neumann Consultants, Germany.