Operational transparency: an advanced safeguards strategy for future on-load refuelled reactors

The IAEA's system for tracking fuel movement in an on-load refuelled heavy-water reactor is robust, but an opportunity remains to exploit the wealth of data streaming from the reactor vault during operation and provide real-time, third-party monitoring of reactor status and history. This concept of Operational Transparency would require that large amounts of operational data be reduced in near-real time to a small subset of high-level information. Operational Transparency would enhance the IAEA's ability to monitor the state of the core to an unprecedented level. This paper provides an overview of the novel concept of Operational Transparency in heavy water reactors, using potential application to CANDU reactors as an example, and explores some of the technical challenges that will need to be solved for efficient implementation. (author)