Korea has an agreement for cooperation with 31 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Under the agreement, the obligated items must be used for peaceful purposes, comply with nuclear non-proliferation and international safeguards, and obtain prior consent of shipment in case of enrichment, reprocessing, retransfer. Among them, the United States, Canada, and Australia have signed Administrative Arrangements of Cooperation Agreements (Supplementary Arrangements in Canada) for the international transfer and annual reports of obligated items. When operators submit an annual report, the government compiles and make the annual report based on the data. Ideally, the final report is submitted by the operator should be the national annual report, but in practice, discrepancies occur between sum of the operator’s and goverment’s. In order to resolve these problems and strengthen the linkage between exports contrpol and safeguards, our institute has begun the project to develop an ‘Obligation Tracking System for internationally controlled items (OTS)’. It is believed that obligated items which are unnecessarily included or omitted in annual report could be managed properly by developing OTS for life cycle of the items such as import, disposal/ termination or transfer to other countries. In case of nuclear material, especially, the characteristics of the facilities (e.g., bulk-handling facilities) must be considered and principles of fungibility, equivalence, and proportionality should be applied to materials. In order to computerize these procedures, we would like to propose to adopt the format of Code 10 for obligated item management. Code 10 is the form of the annex to the Korea-IAEA safeguards agreement which includes all records of inventory changes, import/export, and domestic movement of nuclear materials. It is expected to minimize discrepancies between operators’ annual reporting data and national annual reporting and further contribute to enhancing national trust and nuclear transparency.

SMR, which has recently been in the spotlight, has several advantages. However, it poses additional challenges in the areas of new design, digitalization, security, safety and safeguards. Among them, security refers to measures to protect nuclear materials and facilities from unauthorized access, theft, or destruction. Safeguards refer to measures to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. The relationship between security and safeguards is complex and constantly evolving. In general, security measures are designed to protect nuclear materials and facilities from physical attack, while safeguards are designed to track and monitor the movement of nuclear materials and prevent them from being used to create nuclear weapons. In some areas security and safeguards work in complementary ways, and in other areas they conflict. But ultimately, finding a balance is what is effective and efficient. In conclusion, although the security and safeguards of SMRs have different key objectives, they are closely related and must be implemented comprehensively and consistently to ensure the safety of nuclear facilities, the public, and the environment. In this paper, we investigate how the safety and safeguards of SMR are currently being researched and analyze what difficulties there are when assuming that they are operated as a single interface.

Material balance evaluation is an important measure to determine whether or not nuclear material is diverted. A prototype code to evaluate material balance has been developed for uranium fuel fabrication facility. However, it is difficult to analyze the code’s functionality and performance because the utilization of real facility data related to material balance evaluation is very limited. It is also restricted to deliberately implement various abnormal situations based on real facility data, such as nuclear diversion condition. In this study, process flow simulator of uranium fuel fabrication facility has been developed to produce various process data required for material balance evaluation. The process flow simulator was developed on the basis of the Simulink-SimEvents framework of the MathWorks. This framework is suitable for batch-based process modeling like uranium fuel fabrication facility. It dynamically simulates the movement of nuclear material according to the time function and provides process data such as nuclear material amount at inputs, outputs, and inventories required for Material Unaccounted For (MUF) and MUF uncertainty calculation. The process flow simulator code provides these data to the material balance evaluation code. And then the material balance evaluation code calculates MUF and MUF uncertainty to evaluate whether or not nuclear material is diverted. The process flow simulator code can simulate the movement of nuclear material for any abnormal situation which is difficult to implement with real process data. This code is expected to contribute to checking and improving the functionality and performance of the prototype code of material balance evaluation by simulating process data for various operation scenarios.

In addition to Korea, various countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and China are designing small module-type reactors. In particular, a small modular reactor is the power of 300 MWe or less, in which the main equipment constituting the nuclear reactor is integrated into a single container. Depending on the purpose, small modular reactors are being developed to help daily life such as power, heating supply, and seawater desalination, or for power supply such as icebreakers, nuclear submarines, and spacecraft propellants. Small modular reactors are classified according to form. It can be classified into light-water reactors/ pressurized light-water reactors based on technology proven in commercial reactors, and non-lightwater reactors based on fuel and coolant type such as Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor, High temperature gas-cooled reactor, Very high temperature reactor and Moltenn salt reactor. SMRs, which are designed for various purposes, have the biggest difference from commercial nuclear reactors. The size of SMRs is as small as 1/5 of that of the commercial reactors. Several modules may be installed to generate the same power as commercial reactors. Because of the individually operation for each module, load follow is possible. Also, The reactor can be cooled by natural convection because the size is small enough. It is manufactured as a module, the construction period can be reduced. Depending on the characteristics of these SMRs, application for safeguards is considered. There are many things to consider in terms of safeguards. Therefore, it is IAEA inspection or other approaches for SMRs installed and remotely operated in isolated areas, data integrity for remote monitoring equipment to prevent the diversion of nuclear materials, verification method and material accountancy and control for new fuel types and reactors. Since SMR is more compact and technical intensive, safeguards should be considered at the design stage so that safeguards can be efficiently and effectively implemented, which is called the Safeguards by design (SBD) in the IAEA. In this paper, according to the characteristics of SMR, we will analyze the advantages/disadvantages from the point of view of safeguards and explain what should be considered.

IAEA has the right and obligation to verify the states’ commitments for safeguards under the comprehensive safeguards agreement and additional protocols. There are IAEA inspections such as PIV, DIV, RII, SNRI under these agreements. As part of the implementation of this mission, the IAEA inspectors perform the verification for the state’s accounting reports related the nuclear materials such as ICR, PIL, MBR. To do well this verification, the inspectors often use non-destructive analysis, which aims to measure attributes of the items during the inspections. This kind of an activity aims to detect the missing nuclear items or wrong things in the facility using nuclear materials. In general, NDA techniques use the neutron counting and gamma ray spectrometry. Besides, IAEA also performs several verification measures as follows. - C/S (Containment and Surveillance techniques) is to maintain the continuity of the knowledge by giving assurance that its containment remains unimpaired. - Unattended and remote monitoring is to transmit the data from onsite of the facility through the on-line system. - E/S (Environmental Sampling) is to detect the minute traces of nuclear materials by smearing some points in the on-site of the facility. Nowadays, the above mentioned techniques are important ways to increase the effectiveness of the safeguards approaches reducing IAEA actual costs. To strengthen the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of safeguards approaches, IAEA always develops and adopts the techniques and equipment for safeguards. Especially, IAEA seems to be concerned with the improvement and development of the non-destructive techniques and equipment in the fields of nuclear fuel cycle. IAEA develops the new techniques and equipment through the help of MSSP (Member States Support Programs). The IAEA defines the needs of safeguards and coordinates the support programs. After the IAEA tests and evaluates the techniques/equipment developed, IAEA decides whether to use the developed techniques and equipment during the inspection by the procedure of the IAEA quality assurance. This paper aims at studying the current changes of the IAEA equipment such as DCVD, NGSS and HCES.