Year
1998
Abstract
An important part of the nuclear material inventory in Argentina is placed in the nuclear fuel cycle devoted to nuclear power generation, with a high frequency of transfers of such material amongst the nuclear facilities involved. These facilities mostly handle natural uranium. At present, the safeguards system for these facilities is based on “Facility Approach” concept. Therefore, for each one of them an independent safeguards approach is applied. However, there are specific procedures that while maintaining or increasing safeguards effectiveness may reduce the inspection resources required in the field. One of these procedures is the “Zone Approach”, by means of which there is a reduction in the need for verifying inventory changes amongst the involved facilities and provides assurance against borrowing of nuclear material within the zone. This paper describes the features of the facilities included in the study, the present safeguards approach applied to them and a feasibility analysis of a zone approach scheme. The comparison between “facility specific approach” and a “zone approach” would allow determining whether a reduction of the inspection effort currently applied to fulfil the quantitative safeguards criteria in force for these facilities is obtained. On the other hand, a result showing a relevant reduction on the inspection effort while maintaining safeguards effectiveness would permit to re-orient these resources for an optimum application of the “Strengthened Safeguards System”.