Safeguards-by-Design: Guidance for Independent Spent Fuel Dry Storage Installations (ISFSI)

This document summarizes the requirements and best practices for implementing international nuclear safeguards at independent spent fuel storage installations (ISFSIs), also known as Away-from- Reactor (AFR) storage facilities. These installations may provide wet or dry storage of spent fuel, although the safeguards guidance herein focuses on dry storage facilities. In principle, the safeguards guidance applies to both wet and dry storage. The reason for focusing on dry independent spent fuel storage installations is that this is one of the fastest growing nuclear installations worldwide. Independent spent fuel storage installations are typically outside of the safeguards nuclear material balance area (MBA) of the reactor. They may be located on the reactor site, but are generally considered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the State Regulator/SSAC to be a separate facility. The need for this guidance is becoming increasingly urgent as more and more nuclear power plants move their spent fuel from resident spent fuel ponds to independent spent fuel storage installations. The safeguards requirements and best practices described herein are also relevant to the design and construction of regional independent spent fuel storage installations that nuclear power plant operators are starting to consider in the absence of a national long-term geological spent fuel repository. The following document has been prepared in support of two of the three foundational pillars for implementing Safeguards-by-Design (SBD). These are: i) defining the relevant safeguards requirements, and ii) defining the best practices for meeting the requirements. This document was prepared with the design of the latest independent dry spent fuel storage installations in mind and was prepared specifically as an aid for designers of commercial nuclear facilities to help them understand the relevant international requirements that follow from a country’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA. If these requirements are understood at the earliest stages of facility design, it will help eliminate the costly retrofit of facilities that has occurred in the past to accommodate nuclear safeguards, and will help the IAEA implement nuclear safeguards worldwide, especially in countries building their first nuclear facilities. It is also hoped that this guidance document will promote discussion between the IAEA, State Regulator/SSAC, Project Design Team, and Facility Owner/Operator at an early stage to ensure that new ISFSIs will be effectively and efficiently safeguarded. This is intended to be a living document, since the international nuclear safeguards requirements may be subject to revision over time. More importantly, the practices by which the requirements are met are continuously modernized by the IAEA and facility operators for greater efficiency and cost effectiveness. As these improvements are made, it is recommended that the subject guidance document be updated and revised accordingly

Simulation Enabled Safeguards Assessment Methodology

It is expected that nuclear energy will be a significant component of future supplies. New facilities, operating under a strengthened international nonproliferation regime will be needed. There is good reason to believe virtual engineering applied to the facility design, as well as to the safeguards system design will reduce total project cost and improve efficiency in the design cycle. Simulation Enabled Safeguards Assessment MEthodology (SESAME) has been developed as a software package to provide this capability for nuclear reprocessing facilities. The software architecture is specifically designed for distributed computing, collaborative design efforts, and modular construction to allow step improvements in functionality. Drag and drop wireframe construction allows the user to select the desired components from a component warehouse, render the system for 3D visualization, and, linked to a set of physics libraries and/or computational codes, conduct process evaluations of the system they have designed

Enabling International Safeguards Research and Development in the United States

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is the lead laboratory in nuclear energy research and development within the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory complex. INL is tasked with the advancement of nuclear energy research and development, and leadership in the renaissance of nuclear power globally. INL scientists have been central to the assessment of needs and the integration of technical programs aimed at the world-wide growth of nuclear power. One of the grand challenges of the nuclear energy resurgence is nuclear nonproliferation. Nonproliferation technology development is key to meeting this challenge. The needed advances in nonproliferation technologies are being made more difficult by the growing gap between increasing demands for nuclear materials to support technology development, and reduced availability of these materials. The gap is caused by the reduction, consolidation and more stringent lockdown of nuclear materials, made necessary by heightened and evolving security concerns, in the face of increased demand for materials to support technology development. Ironically, the increased demand for materials for technology development is made necessary by these same security concerns. The situation will continue to worsen if safeguards and security budgets remain limited for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and many member states, while growth in global nuclear energy becomes a reality. Effective U.S. leadership in the closing of this gap is vital to homeland security and global stability. INL has taken positive steps, described in this paper, to close this gap by reestablishing a viable base for the development, testing and demonstration of safeguards and security technologies. Key attributes of this technology development base are (1) the availability of a wide variety of special nuclear materials in forms that allow for enhanced accessibility; (2) ease of access by U.S. government, national laboratory, industry and academic institution researchers; (3) openness to and ease of access by international users working through U.S. government sponsoring agencies; and (4) the availability of requisite infrastructure to support research, testing and demonstration. While there is still work to do in closing the gap between material accessibility and demand, the steps taken by INL to date begin to address this important challenge

Implementing Safeguards-by-Design

Executive Summary Excerpt Safeguards-by-Design (SBD) is an approach to the design and construction of nuclear facilities whereby safeguards are designed-in from the very beginning. It is a systematic and structured approach for fully integrating international and national safeguards (MC&A), physical security, and other proliferation barriers into the design and construction process for nuclear facilities. SBD is primarily a project management or project coordination challenge, and this report focuses on that aspect of SBD. The present report continues the work begun in 2008 and focuses specifically on the design process, or project management and coordination - the planning, definition, organization, coordination, scheduling and interaction of activities of the safeguards experts and stakeholders as they participate in the design and construction of a nuclear facility. It delineates the steps in a nuclear facility design and construction project, in order to provide the project context within which the safeguards design activities take place, describes the involvement of safeguards experts in the design process, the nature of their analyses, interactions and decisions, as well as describing the documents created and how they are used. Designing and constructing a nuclear facility is an extremely complex undertaking. The stakeholders in an actual project are many – owner, operator, State regulators, nuclear facility primary contractor, subcontractors (e.g. instrument suppliers), architect engineers, project management team, safeguards, safety and security experts, in addition to the IAEA and its team. The purpose of the present report is to provide a common basis for discussions amongst stakeholders to collaboratively develop a SBD approach that will be both practically useful and mutually beneficial. The principal conclusions from the present study are: • In the short term, the successful implementation of SBD is principally a project management problem. • Life-cycle cost analysis can be a useful tool in safeguards design. • An important obstacle to straight forward application of life-cycle cost analysis is that there is no single organization responsible for the entire life-cycle cost of the facility. • The Safeguards Effectiveness Report (SGER) is proposed as a focus for the safeguards design activities, and is intended to be a living document that contains increasing safeguards relevant scope and content as the facility design emerges. Further work is required in a number of areas. The authors note that other studies supported by NGSI are addressing the development of requirements and performance criteria, as well as contributing to the design toolkit through the development of technology, methodology, and safeguards guidelines for designers. With respect to further development of the SBD design process, the authors recommend: • In the short term, conduct a workshop with interested industry representatives, to ensure that their perspectives and needs are factored into further development. • In the short term, provide NGSI SBD project documents to IAEA, and support them in the conduct of an ‘SBD Workshop II.” • In the medium term, continue to support the SBD demonstration work started with the Next Generation Nuclear Plant project. • In the longer term, conduct further studies to examine the integration of SBD into projects with concurrent consideration of physical security and safety

Current Comparison of Advanced Nuclear Fuel Cycles

This paper compares potential nuclear fuel cycle strategies – once-through, recycling in thermal reactors, sustained recycle with a mix of thermal and fast reactors, and sustained recycle with fast reactors. Initiation of recycle starts the draw-down of weapons-usable material and starts accruing improvements for geologic repositories and energy sustainability. It reduces the motivation to search for potential second geologic repository sites. Recycle in thermal-spectr

Achieving the Benefits of Safeguards by Design

The overarching driver for developing a formalized process to achieve safeguards by design is to support the global growth of nuclear power while reducing ‘nuclear security’ risks. This paper discusses an institutional approach to the design process for a nuclear facility, for designing proliferation resistance, international safeguards and U.S. national safeguards and security into new nuclear facilities. In the United States, the need exists to develop a simple, concise, formalized, and integrated approach for incorporating international safeguards and other non-proliferation considerations into the facility design process. An effective and efficient design process is one which clearly defines the functional requirements at the beginning of the project and provides for the execution of the project to achieve a reasonable balance among competing objectives in a cost effective manner. Safeguards by Design is defined as “the integration of international and national safeguards, physical security and non-proliferation features as full and equal partners in the design process of a nuclear energy system or facility,” with the objective to achieve facilities that are intrinsically more robust while being less expensive to safeguard and protect. This Safeguards by Design process has been developed such that it: • Provides improved safeguards, security, and stronger proliferation barriers, while reducing the life cycle costs to the operator and regulatory agencies, • Can be translated to any international context as a model for nuclear facility design, • Fosters a culture change to ensure the treatment of ‘nuclear security’ considerations as “full and equal” partners in the design process, • Provides a useful tool for the project manager responsible for the design, construction, and start-up of nuclear facilities, and • Addresses the key integration activities necessary to efficiently incorporate International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards into the design of nuclear facilities. This paper describes the work that has been completed in the development of a Safeguards by Design process for a project, illustrated by flow diagrams based upon the project phases described in U.S. Department of Energy Order 413.3A, Program and Project Management for the Acquisition of Capital Assets. The institutionalization of the Safeguards by Design process directly supports the goals of the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative and also aligns with goals and objectives of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Other benefits from institutionalizing this Safeguards by Design process are discussed within this paper

Which Elements Should be Recycled for a Comprehensive Fuel Cycle?

Uranium recovery can reduce the mass of waste and possibly the number of waste packages that require geologic disposal. Separated uranium can be managed with the same method (near-surface burial) as used for the larger quantities of depleted uranium or recycled into new fuel. Recycle of all transuranics reduces long-term environmental burden, reduces heat load to repositories, extracts more energy from the original uranium ore, and may have significant proliferation resistance and physical security advantages. Recovery of short-lived fission products cesium and strontium can allow them to decay to low-level waste in facilities tailored to that need, rather than geologic disposal. This could also reduce the number and cost of waste packages requiring geologic disposal. These savings are offset by costs for separation, recycle, and storage systems. Recovery of technetium-99 and iodine-129 can allow them to be sent to geologic disposal in improved waste forms. Such separation avoids contamination of the other products (uranium) and waste (cesium-strontium) streams with long-lived radioisotopes so the material might be disposed as low-level waste. Transmutation of technetium and iodine is a possible future alternative

Intent, Capability and Opportunity: A Holistic Approach to Addressing Proliferation as a Risk Management Issue

Currently, proliferation risk assessment models are designed to evaluate only a portion of the overall risk, focusing exclusively on either technological or social factors to determine the extent of a threat. Many of these models are intended to act as a means of predicting proliferation potential rather than assessing the system as a whole, ignoring the ability to enhance mitigating factors and manage, rather just establish the presence of, the threat. While the information garnered through these forms of analysis is necessary, it remains incomplete. By incorporating political, social, economic and technical capabilities as well as human factors such as intent into a single, multi-faceted risk management model, proliferation risk can be evaluated more effectively. Framing this information around how to improve and expand the Regime already in place and establishing where there are gaps in the system allows for a more complete approach to risk management, mitigation and resource allocation. The research conducted here seeks to combine all three elements (intent, capability and opportunity) in a comprehensive evaluation which incorporates an assessment of state-level variables, possible proliferation pathways and technical capability. Each portion of the analysis is carried out independently then combined to illustrate the full scope of a State's nuclear infrastructure while showing areas of weakness in the institutional framework

Material Control and Accounting Design Considerations for High-Temperature Gas Reactors

The subject of this report is domestic safeguards and security by design (2SBD) for high-temperature gas reactors, focusing on material control and accountability (MC&A). The motivation for the report is to provide 2SBD support to the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) project, which was launched by Congress in 2005. This introductory section will provide some background on the NGNP project and an overview of the 2SBD concept. The remaining chapters focus specifically on design aspects of the candidate high-temperature gas reactors (HTGRs) relevant to MC&A, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requirements, and proposed MC&A approaches for the two major HTGR reactor types: pebble bed and prismatic. Of the prismatic type, two candidates are under consideration: (1) GA's GT-MHR (Gas Turbine-Modular Helium Reactor), and (2) the Modular High-Temperature Reactor (M-HTR), a derivative of Areva's Antares reactor. The future of the pebble-bed modular reactor (PBMR) for NGNP is uncertain, as the PBMR consortium partners (Westinghouse, PBMR [Pty] and The Shaw Group) were unable to agree on the path forward for NGNP during 2010. However, during the technology assessment of the conceptual design phase (Phase 1) of the NGNP project, AREVA provided design information and technology assessment of their pebble bed fueled plant design called the HTR-Module concept. AREVA does not intend to pursue this design for NGNP, preferring instead a modular reactor based on the prismatic Antares concept. Since MC&A relevant design information is available for both pebble concepts, the pebble-bed HTGRs considered in this report are: (1) Westinghouse PBMR; and (2) AREVA HTR-Module. The DOE Office of Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) sponsors the Fuel Cycle Research and Development program (FCR&D), which contains an element specifically focused on the domestic (or state) aspects of SBD. This Material Protection, Control and Accountancy Technology (MPACT) program supports the present work summarized in this report, namely the development of guidance to support the consideration of MC&A in the design of both pebble-bed and prismatic-fueled HTGRs. The objective is to identify and incorporate design features into the facility design that will cost effectively aid in making MC&A more effective and efficient, with minimum impact on operations. The theft of nuclear material is addressed through both MC&A and physical protection, while the threat of sabotage is addressed principally through physical protection