IAEA Safeguards: Cost/benefit analysis of commercial satellite imagery

A major milestone in the efforts to strengthen the Safeguards System was reached in May 1997 when the Board of Governors approved a 'Model Protocol Additional to Safeguards Agreements'. The Protocol provides the legal basis necessary to enhance the Agency's ability to detect undeclared nuclear material and activities by using information available from open sources to complement the declarations made by Member States. Commercially available high-resolution satellite data has emerged as one potential complementary open information source to support the traditional and extended Safeguard activities of IAEA. This document constitutes a first report from SSC Satellitbild giving the Agency tentative and initial estimates of the potential cost and time-savings possible with the new proposed technology. The initial cost/benefit simulation will be further finalised in the following 'Implementation Blueprint' study. The general foundation and starting point for the cost/benefit calculation is to simulate a new efficient and relatively small 'imagery unit' within the IAEA, capable of performing advanced image processing as a tool for various safeguards tasks. The image processing capacity is suggested to be task- and interpretation-oriented. The study was performed over a period of 1,5 weeks in late 1998, and is based upon interviews of IAEA staff, reviews of existing IAEA documentation as well as from SSC Satellitbild's long-standing experience of satellite imagery and field missions. The cost/benefit analysis is based on a spreadsheet simulation of five potential applications of commercial satellite imagery: Reference information; Confirmation of Agency acquired and Member State supplied data; Change detection and on-going monitoring; Assessing open source information available to the Agency; Detecting undeclared activities and undeclared sites. The study confirms that the proposed concept of a relatively small 'imagery unit' using high-resolution data will be a sound and feasible undertaking. Such a unit capable of performing advanced image processing as a tool for various safeguard tasks will give the Agency an effective instrument for reference, monitoring, verification, and detection of declared and undeclared activities. It is also demonstrated in the study that more than 20% of the envisaged work tasks in all of the major Safeguards applications will achieve a better decision support from the use of commercial satellite imagery. At the same time the potential savings in costs is calculated to approximately USD 500,000 per year by reductions in on-site inspections and by more efficient planning and logistics. The total cost for implementing commercial satellite imagery at the Department for Safeguards, as simulated in this study, is approximately USD 1,500,000 per year. This cost rises when utilising the full potential of high-resolution imagery in all five applications including monitoring and detection of undeclared facilities. The cost/benefit simulation is founded on an activity scenario with a staff of 4 experts working in an IAEA imagery unit with a workload of three dossiers or 'issues' per week. The imagery unit is built around an advanced workstation PC image processing system capable of handling several hundreds of pre-processed imagery per year