DATA BASE CONCEPTS FOR MANAGING THE DOE NUCLEAR MATERIAL INVENTORY

Information required by nuclear materials managers in the Department of Energy (DOE) is accessible with varying levels of difficulty. Currently, the most readily available information is provided by the Nuclear Materials Management and Safeguards System (NMMSS). Information not provided by NMMSS must be obtained either from field site data bases or collected through physical inventory inspections, both very costly and time-consuming alternatives. This paper discusses the possibility of providing more detailed information at DOE headquarters on nuclear material inventories than is provided by NMMSS. In particular, this paper considers some of the issues associated with managing materials at the lowestlevel -- the item-level -- and uses a hypothetical item- Ievel data base to describe some of the advantages and disadvantages of managing information at the item-level.