The discovery in Iraq after the Gulf War of the existence of a large clandestine nuclear-weapon program has led to an across-the-board international effort, dubbed Programme 93+2, to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. One particularly significant potential change is the introduction of environmental monitoring (EM) techniques as an adjunct to traditional safeguards methods. Monitoring of stable noble gas (Kr, Xe) isotopic abundances at reprocessing plant stacks appears to be able to yield information on the burnup and type of the fuel being processed. To estimate the size of these signals, model calculations of the production of stable Kr, Xe nuclides in reactor fuel and the subsequent dilution of these nuclides in the plant stack are carried out for two case studies: reprocessing of PWR fuel with a burnup of 35 GWd/tU, and reprocessing of CAND fuel with a burnup of 1 GWd/tU. For each case, a maximum-likelihood analysis is used to determine the fuel burnup and type from the isotopic data
