REMOTE NEAR REAL-TIME DATA ANALYSIS AND
DECISION-MAKING IN EPGR SAFEGUARDS – RISK ANALYSIS

In less than two years’ time, the world’s first encapsulation plant and geological repository (EPGR) for long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel will start operations in Finland. The transfer process will run in continuous multi-day campaigns and last for several decades. International safeguards inspectorates, in cooperation with the nuclear operator Posiva Oy and the Finnish national authority STUK, have designed detailed requirements for the safeguards infrastructure and agreed on the main principles of its implementation. These are aimed at meeting the required safeguards goals by the inspectorates at an acceptable cost and inspector workload, while minimizing the impact on the operator’s processes. With the safeguards equipment infrastructure agreed and incorporated into the general design of EPGR facilities, key choices must now be made to determine the best way to apply safeguards along the geological disposal process. A multisensory and multilayer system designed to maintain continuity of knowledge (CoK) on nuclear material flow will monitor all stages of the process; this is expected to generate a large amount of data to be transmitted to EURATOM and IAEA headquarters for real-time processing. Stages of the disposal process governed by the operator will correlate with the safeguards inspectorates’ in-process verification and confirmation points, with near real-time (NRT) analysis performed to match the operator’s declarations with the data collected by safeguards equipment along the transfer route. This verification methodology mitigates the impact of losing CoK during the final disposal process. In-process verification and the inspectorate approvals are time critical as these are needed for uninterrupted process continuation. This paper presents an analysis of the risks of real-time decision support and lists available fallback options in case inspectorate approvals are not possible.