Abstract
As uranium enrichment plants increase in number, capacity, and types of separative technology deployed (e.g., gas centrifuge, laser, etc.), more automated safeguards measures are needed to enable the IAEA to maintain safeguards effectiveness in a fiscally constrained environment. Monitoring load cell data can significantly increase the IAEA’s ability to efficiently achieve the fundamental safeguards objective of confirming operations as declared (i.e., no undeclared activities), but care must be taken to fully protect the operator’s proprietary and classified information related to operations. Staff at ORNL, LANL, JRC/ISPRA, and University of Glasgow are investigating monitoring the process load cells at feed and withdrawal (F/W) stations to improve international safeguards at enrichment plants. A key question that must be resolved is what is the necessary frequency of recording data from the process F/W stations? Several studies have analyzed data collected at a fixed frequency. This paper contributes to load cell process monitoring research by presenting an analysis of Monte Carlo simulations to determine the expected errors caused by low frequency sampling and its impact on material balance calculations.
