Safeguard sleuths

A report of the conference of the European Safeguards Research and Development Association, which tries to prevent the diversion of nuclear materials to military uses is given. Some of the problems encountered by safeguards inspectors are mentioned, such as being able to follow the material through the maze of piping in a reprocessing plant, the linguistic difficulties if the inspector does not speak the operator's language, the difference between precision and accuracy and the necessity of human inspection, containment and surveillance systems. Unexplained outages at a reprocessing plant are always treated as suspicious, as are power failures which prevent normal surveillance. The UK practice of allocating civil fuel temporarily to military use at Harwell also makes safeguard policing more difficult. (UK)