Status and Trends of Safeguards Equipment Development

Meeting the technical and logistical challenges of international safeguards instrumentation has been a major concern since the first safeguards inspection in the early 1960s. This concern and the related activities have been pursued vigorously since the inception of Member State Support Programmes in 1976. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with the vital and crucial assistance of member states, has strived toward reliable, credible instrumentation that can be directed toward the various specific applications encountered in the nuclear fuel cycle. This paper provides a status report on agency instrumentation as of 1993 and lists some of the new, perhaps even more formidable, challenges and trends that are expected to be encountered over the next few years.