Year
1988
Abstract
Material accountability (MA) activities focus on providing after-the-fact indication of diversion or theft of special nuclear material (SNM). MA activities include maintaining records for tracking nuclear material and conducting periodic inventories and audits to ensure that loss has not occurred. The MA system \"alarms\" when inventory differences exceed acceptable limits or when discrepancies arise between facility records and measured quantities of materials. Since MA alarms are typically too late to prevent the theft or diversion of material, it is often difficult to value the safeguards contribution of MA. Specifically, decision-makers may ask: Why should we upgrade MA afterthe- fact detection capabilities beyond MA requirements for facility operations? Would it not always be better to allocate upgrades resources to enhance theft detection in the areas of physical protection (PP) and material control (MC), rather than material accountability? This paper presents a value model concept for assessing the safeguards benefits of MA activities and for comparing these benefits to those provided by PP and MC components. The model considers various benefits of MA, which include: 1) providing information to assist in recovery of missing material, 2) providing assurance that physical protection and material control systems have been working, 3) defeating protracted theft attempts, and 4) properly resolving causes of and responding appropriately to anomalies of missing material and external alarms (e.g., hoax). Such a value model can aid decisionmakers in allocating safeguards resources among PP, MC, and MA systems.