ASSESSMENT OF ACCOUNTABILITY AND SAFEGUARDS EFFICIENCIES

Accountability and safeguards problems fall into the class of problems of searches for an anomaly, which in this case happens to be either an undesired amount of special nuclear material (SNM) in a specimen or the person or parcel which possesses SNM which is being removed surreptitiously. In such searches, principles from information theory can be used to relate the relative efficiency of the search itself to the relative efficiency of the detector. Such correlations have been examined, and provide some insight into the improvement of the search potentially available from an altered detector efficiency. Example calculations are presented.