The potential of open source information in supporting Acquisition Pathway Analysis to design IAEA State Level Approaches

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards designed to deter nuclear proliferation are constantly evolving to respond to new challenges. Within its State Level Concept, the IAEA envisions an objective-based and information-driven approach for designing and implementing State Level Approaches (SLAs), using all available measures to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards. The main Objectives of a SLA are a) to detect undeclared nuclear material or activities in the State, b) to detect undeclared production or processing of nuclear materials in declared facilities or locations outside facilities (LOFs), c) to detect diversion of declared nuclear material in declared facilities or LOFs. Under the SLA, States will be differentiated based upon objective State-Specific Factors that influence the design, planning, conduct and evaluation of safeguards activities. Proposed categories of factors include both technical and legal aspects, spanning from the deployed fuel cycle and the related state's technical capability to the type of safeguards agreements in force and the IAEA experience in implementing safeguards in that state. To design a SLA, the IAEA foresees the use of Acquisition Path Analysis (APA) to identify the plausible routes for acquiring weapons-usable material and to assess their safeguards significance. In order to achieve this goal, APA will have to identify possible acquisition paths, characterize them and eventually prioritise them. This paper will provide an overview of how the use of open source information (here loosely defined as any type of non-classified or proprietary information and including, but not limited to, media sources, government and non-governmental reports and analyses, commercial data, satellite imagery, scientific/technical literature, trade data) can support this activity in the various aspects of a typical APA approach.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit

Long-Term Planning for Nuclear Energy Systems Under Deep Uncertainty

Long-term planning for nuclear energy systems has been an area of interest for policy planners and systems designers to assess and manage the complexity of the system and the long-term, wide-ranging societal impacts of decisions. However, traditional planning tools are often poorly equipped to cope with the deep parametric, structural, and value uncertainties in long-term planning. A more robust, multiobjective decision-making method is applied to a model of the nuclear fuel cycle to address the many sources of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to long-term planning. Unlike prior studies that rely on assessing the outcomes of a limited set of deployment strategies, solutions in this study arise from optimizing behavior against multiple incommensurable objectives, utilizing goal-seeking multiobjective evolutionary algorithms to identify minimax regret solutions across various demand scenarios. By excluding inferior and infeasible solutions, the choice between the Pareto optimal solutions depends on a decision-maker's preferences for the defined outcomes - limiting analyst bias and increasing transparency.Though simplified by the necessity of reducing computational burdens, the nuclear fuel cycle model captures important phenomena governing the behavior of the nuclear energy system relevant to the decision to close the fuel cycle - incorporating reactor population dynamics, material stocks and flows, constraints on material flows, and outcomes of interest to decision-makers. Technology neutral performance criteria are defined consistent with the Generation IV International Forum goals of improved security and proliferation resistance based on structural features of the nuclear fuel cycle, natural resource sustainability, and waste production. A review of safety risks and the economic history of the development of nuclear technology suggests that safety and economic criteria may not be decisive criteria as the safety risks posed by alternative fuel cycles may be comparable in aggregate and economic performance is uncertain and path dependent.Technology strategies impacting reactor lifetimes and advanced reactor introduction dates are evaluated against a high, medium, and phaseout scenarios of nuclear energy demand. Non-dominated, minimax regret solutions are found with the NSGA- II multiobjective evolutionary algorithm. Results suggest that more aggressive technology strategies featuring the early introduction of breeder and burner reactors, possibly combined with lifetime extension of once-through systems, tend to dominate less aggressive strategies under more demanding growth scenarios over the next century. Less aggressive technology strategies that delay burning and breeding tend to be clustered in the minimax regret space, suggesting greater sensitivity to shifts in preferences. Lifetime extension strategies can unexpectedly result in fewer deployments of once-through systems, permitting the growth of advanced systems to meet demand. Both breeders and burners are important for controlling plutonium inventories with breeders achieving lower inventories in storage by locking material in reactor cores while burners can reduce the total inventory in the system. Other observations include the indirect impacts of some performance measures, the relatively small impact of technology strategies on the waste properties of all material in the system, and the difficulty of phasing out nuclear energy while meeting all objectives with the specified technology options

Methodological aspects on the IAEA State Level Concept and related Acquisition Path Analysis

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards designed to deter nuclear proliferation continue to evolve to respond to new challenges. Within its State Level Concept, the IAEA envisions a State Level Approach for safeguards implementation that considers a State’s nuclear and nuclear-related activities and capabilities as a whole within the scope of the State’s safeguards agreement to meet generic safeguards objectives. For a State with a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, these generic safeguards objectives are to detect diversion of declared nuclear material in declared facilities or LOFs, to detect undeclared production or processing of nuclear materials in declared facilities or locations outside facilities (LOFs), and to detect undeclared nuclear material or activities in the State. Under the SLA, States will be differentiated based upon State-Specific Factors (SSF) that influence the design, planning, conduct and evaluation of safeguards activities. Proposed categories of factors include both technical and legal aspects, spanning from the deployed fuel cycle and the related state’s technical capability to the type of safeguards agreements in force and the IAEA experience in implementing safeguards in that State. SSFs related to a State’s technical capabilities are captured through an Acquisition Path Analysis (APA) that identifies plausible routes for acquiring weapons-usable material. In order to achieve this goal, the APA will have to identify possible acquisition paths, characterize them and eventually prioritise them. A key issue affecting the SLC’s ability to satisfy effectiveness, efficiency, and nondiscrimination principle is the objectivity of technical SSFs captured through the APA. A review of proposed APA methods and historical evidence indicates that assessments of a State’s technical capabilities and pathway completion times may not be as objective as has been suggested. Process modifications will be proposed to improve pathways characterization, supporting the SLC, such as developing a sounder basis for technical plausibility, formalizing considerations of intrinsic technical difficulty, assessing uncertainties in collected information and issuing guidance on omitted SSFs that may influence pathway completion times.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit

A Systems Thinking Approach to Open Source Information Analysis For Nuclear Non Proliferation

Nuclear programmes are complex engineering programmes lasting several years, involving multiple sites and a substantial number of personnel with a wide range of expertise. States willing to embark in such an enterprise would have to either sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and benefit from the transfer of technology enabled by its membership or develop the necessary science, technology and industrial capability autonomously. States signatories of the NPT renounce the possibility to develop a nuclear military programme and are subject to international nuclear safeguards implemented by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Agency, in its assessment, performs an all-source analysis making use of all the information and knowledge available to it, including closed-source (official State’s declarations, inspection data, third parties information) and open source information. This paper provides an overview of what is open source analysis when taking a holistic perspective and how it could be used to detect and monitor a complex engineering programme as a nuclear programme, here described adopting a systems thinking, holistic point of view. Illustrative examples of open source analysis related to the Enrichment fuel cycle step will be presented.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit

Recent Developments Promoting Open-Source Synergy: Emerging Trends and Their Impact for Nuclear Nonproliferation Analysis

A number of recent developments in open-source information technology are creating new opportunities for data fusion for nuclear nonproliferation verification applications, particularly when some aspect of that information includes a geospatial component. Those developments include enhanced “new media” data mining tools and techniques to derive cueing information for indications of previously unknown and hence undeclared activity, coupled with rapidly expanding commercial satellite imaging capabilities and constellations, and new means to efficiently access them. In just the past year, there has been a significant expansion in the number of tools available in the open source information toolkit to draw from structured and unstructured big data, inter alia news media, social media and trade data. New open-source geospatial tools continue to keep pace, making it increasingly easy to follow-up such derived information having a geospatial context. Commercial satellite imagery has already been proven to be an effective and accepted means for nuclear monitoring, verification, and mission planning for IAEA safeguards purposes; it is still a relatively new “open-source” technology for routine information collection and analysis. Commercial satellite imagery (and its requisite processing and analysis) is continuing to evolve and advance as a result of radically new improvements in terms of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions from increasingly diverse and rapidly growing international satellite constellations. Improved means of access to this multi-resolution imagery diversity (nearing ubiquity, providing near persistent global surveillance in near-real time) will increasingly also provide a new basis for open-source information augmentation with previously unexpected synergistic effects. This paper reviews some key elements of this open-source (r)evolution, updates earlier work on the subject by these authors, and explains (by way of a few exemplar cases) how this expanding and evolving open-source tool-kit is making it easier, in terms of time and cost, to derive and assess new nuclear nonproliferation relevant information.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit

Open Source Analysis in Support to Nonproliferation and Verification Activities: Using the New Media to Derive Unknown New Information

This paper describes evolving techniques that are synergistically being applied in unique ways to make new information discoveries that might otherwise have likely remained unknown. These techniques leverage multiple freely available open source social media venues, as part of the encompassing “New Media,” to derive cueing information for indications of previously unknown and hence undeclared activity. Because such cueing often relates to physical infrastructure (facilities and equipment), and thus has a strong geo-positional component, it can also be followed-up with open source geospatial visualization tools (“geographic browsers” or “virtual globes”) and commercial satellite imagery (with its ever improving spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions) to significantly expand the nuclear nonproliferation knowledge base as will be shown by way of a review of some recent exemplar cases. The methodological application of such techniques can complement other forms of open source data mining for safeguards purposes to improve the likelihood of the remote detection of undeclared nuclear related facilities and/or activities.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit

ESARDA Bulletin No. 53

ESARDA is an association initially formed to advance and harmonize research and development for nuclear safeguards whose scope has in recent year expanded as the number and type of its working groups’ activities below indicates. Esarda is currently composed of about 30 laboratories, private and governmental institutions worldwide. Within Esarda (http://esarda.jrc.ec.europa.eu/), a number working groups have been over the years established and active namely: Techniques and Standards for Destructive Analysis, Techniques and Standards for Non-Destructive Analysis, Containment and Surveillance, Novel Approaches / Novel Technologies, Implementation of Safeguards, Verification Technologies and Methodologies, Training and Knowledge Management, Editorial Committee. ESARDA publishes a Bulletin containing scientific and technical articles related to safeguards and verification (and beyond) as well as news and reports related to the ESARDA activities. This publication appears generally twice a year. In addition, thematic special issues are published as proposed by the ESARDA community. The Bulletin Editorial Board is composed of about 10 experts in the various technical and scientific fields related to safeguards. They are all actively engaged in safeguards R&D or in safeguards implementation and other fields. The Editorial Board decides the contents of the Bulletin, selects the papers to be published and reviews them before publication. All ESARDA editorial activities are carried out at JRC in Ispra. Scientific and technical papers submitted for publication in the peer reviewed section are reviewed by independent authors and by members of the Editorial Committee. The bulletin is currently submitted to Thomson Reuters for evaluation in view of citation. ESARDA Bulletin is published jointly by ESARDA and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and distributed free of charge to over 1100 registered members, libraries and institutions worldwide. The bulletin will predominantly contain peer review papers which have been either directly submitted to the journal by the scientific community or selected by the editorial committee and chair sessions of Esarda symposia and or Workshops. The bulletin may also contain reports on the activities of various Esarda working groups, tribune, news etc. where appropriate.JRC.G.II.7-Nuclear securit