Application Of Virtual Tour For Online Training Safeguards Exercises

The Integrated Support Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security (ISCN) of the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) developed the virtual tour of a reference nuclear facility. The developed virtual tour was applied to the Design Information Questionnaire (DIQ) workshop exercise for the online regional training course on the State System of Accounting for and Control of Nuclear Material (Online RTC- SSAC) held in November 2020. Also, it was applied to the Complementary Access (CA) exercise for the online workshop of the Nuclear Security and Safeguards Project under the Forum for Nuclear Cooperation in Asia (FNCA), held in February 2021. The workshop exercises have been implemented for in-person format however due to COVID-19 pandemic, a virtual tour was applied. The virtual tour was found to be a strong tool not only for online training as an alternative for a facility tour, but also considered to be more advantageous even for the in-person training. The developed virtual tour of a reference nuclear facility, going to shut down, can find potentially varied applications. The paper describes how to create a virtual tour of a reference research reactor facility for the DIQ and CA exercises respectively which have different learning objectives. It emphasizes how the features of the reference facility were captured and the challenges encountered to convey to the training participants the importance of providing the required design information while not being physically present at the facility. It also show the advantage of using the same virtual tour to describe the safeguards-related verification activities of a complementary access. Virtual tours can be applied to a variety of training.