HOW MUCH TESTING IS NECESSARY? HOW CAN WE OBTAIN THE BEST PRACTICAL QUANTIFICATION HOW CAN WE OBTAIN THE BEST PRACTICAL QUANTIFICATION

The Department of Energy (DOE) requires its facilities which have custody of special nuclear material (SNM) to demonstrate that their safeguards systems achieve a designated level of performance in detecting the theft or diversion of SNM. A major portion of the effort in conducting these vulnerability assessments is the determination of a quantitative value that describes the facility's capability of detecting and neutralizing the theft or diversion. However, the primary objective of these analyses is to assist DOE in making a qualitative statement regarding the adequacy of the safeguards programs throughout the DOE complex. In onderto obtain atechnically defendable quantification of the overall performance of the facility's system, facilities will need to obtain valid estimates of the individual elements that contribute to the overall performance of the safeguards and security system. This will require facilities to conduct performance tests on individual detection elements. However, performance testing can be costly and time consuming. It is possible that too much performance testing could result in a degradation of the safeguards system performance if resources are transferred from protection to testing. Therefore, it is necessary to design a perform ancetestingapproach that will yieldthebestquantification of the overall safeguards system performance without adversely impacting the protection of the SNM. This will enable DOE to make more realistic statements regarding the quality of safeguards performance at its facilities.