Solution monitoring: quantitative and qualitative benefits to nuclear safeguards

Nuclear safeguards includes periodic evaluation of material balances (MB) as a check for whether material is missing. In the case of large facilities that reprocess spent fuel, it is anticipated that the MB measurement uncertainty will be too large to meet statistical loss detection goals. Nonetheless, many believe that large reprocessing facilities can be effectively safeguarded with an appropriate combination of monitoring, MB accounting, and containment/surveillance (C/S) measures. We anticipate that solution monitoring (SM) will be a challenging but extremely useful new safeguards monitoring measure. This paper investigates how SM could improve loss detection in a formal statistical sense and discusses qualitative safeguards benefits of SM