Year
2021
Abstract
The IAEA has developed a new safeguard verification software tool called the “Near Real Time System” (NRTS). NRTS is safeguard data analysis and verification software for facilities where automated analysis is required due to factors such as rapid process time availability and location accessibility impediments. Using data collected from unattended safeguard NDA instruments, which operate continuously without human intervention, NRTS software has the capability of providing notifications in near real time (in less than 2 hours) both to IAEA Inspectorate and to Facility Operators to indicate that (i) the required safeguards data has been collected, analyzed and verified upon data declared by the Operator itself; and that (ii) a subsequent, specific (often irreversible) process step, such as the welding of a spent fuel (SF) canister before it enters a long-term storage, may then be performed. This software, is currently implemented and deployed for monitoring the nuclear material (NM) flows at the Chornobyl NPP conditioning facility (ISF2) in Ukraine, and in the coming years will be extended to activities at other facilities, such as the Encapsulation Plants and Geological Repositories (EPGRs) planned in Finland and Sweden. Starting from the description of SF processes at ISF2 and how additional information related to the spent fuel to be encapsulated and operator declared activities are fed to NRTS algorithms, the paper will provide an overview of NRTS features and results during the ISF2 hot test, where the activities needed to fill and weld a canister were analyzed and automatically verified with an efficiency of almost 97%. Furthermore, IAEA plans on the use of NRTS for EPGRs type facilities will be presented and briefly discussed.