Speaker
Description
Safeguards by design (SBD) is vital to ensuring “safeguardability” of novel, small modular, and other advanced nuclear reactors and facility types, as well as maintaining safeguards effectiveness and efficiency for such facilities. The IAEA encourages SBD among facility designers and vendors, but it is not a requirement the IAEA can enforce and instead the onus is on industry to deliver it. However, the practical application of SBD is poorly understood for specific facility types and many advanced reactor developers are new to safeguards and often unaware of safeguards requirements. The few designers that do engage the IAEA often seek an IAEA’s “seal of approval” to make designs more marketable, which the IAEA cannot give. However, the IAEA and national governments are often constrained in their ability to conduct outreach to reactor designers as this would be viewed as promoting one designer over another. This creates a scenario where the IAEA looks to Member States and industry, Member States look to industry and back to the IAEA, and industry often looks back to the IAEA, if at all. The paper will describe this “Catch-22” in SBD implementation, describe some practical implications of SBD, and suggest paths forward for effective implementation.
| Country OR International Organization | Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation |
|---|---|
| Email address | nmayhew@vcdnp.org |
| Confirm that the work is original and has not been published anywhere else | YES |
