Information Analysis Key To Safeguards Success, Says IAEA Deputy Chief

16 June (NucNet): Information analysis is now key to the success of the international verification regime for nuclear safeguards and the detection of illicit transfer of nuclear materials, IAEA deputy director-general and head of the department of safeguards Olli Heinonen has said.

“You cannot meet today’s energy needs with yesterday’s tools and the same applies to safeguards,” said Mr Heinonen. “You can’t be in tomorrow’s wars with yesterday’s instruments and methodologies and the key to that is information analysis.

“We live in a very different world to that of the 1960s when the non-proliferation treaty was negotiated and the basic safeguards verification scheme was developed” added Mr Heinonen.

He said in the case of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the IAEA had found that even nuclear weapons designs could be communicated in electronic form, and “this is the new way to distribute sensitive technologies”. The safeguards system needs to be fit to meet this challenge now, Mr Heinonen said.

Mr Heinonen was speaking on 15 June 2010 in Karlsruhe, Germany at a European Commission symposium celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Commission’s on-site laboratories at Sellafield in the UK, and at La Hague, France.

The laboratories, operated by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) directorate-general and the Karlsruhe-based Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU), monitor the safeguards compliance of 80 percent of the world’s reprocessed nuclear fuel, conducting nuclear material accountancy and physical verification of samples for the IAEA to determine whether they have been diverted from their intended use.

Thomas Fanghänel, director of the ITU, said that the on-site laboratories in Sellafield and La Hague had established themselves as a “cornerstone of safeguarding reprocessing plants in Europe,” adding that the European Commission would also co-fund regional nuclear security training centres in Asia in the future.

The only similar facility elsewhere in the world is the on-site laboratory at the Rokkasho reprocessing plant in Japan, established with the help of JRC experts and now operated by the IAEA.

For more information on the European Commission Joint Research Centre, visit: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm

For further information on the Institute for Transuranium Elements, visit: http://itu.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

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