Developing an SSAC Self-Assessment Tool for Operators and Regulators

State Systems of Accounting for and Control of Nuclear Materials (SSAC) are the organizational arrangements at a national level that enable countries to manage their nuclear materials and meet their international safeguards obligations to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As such, SSAC performance can play an important role in determining how the IAEA allocates and spends its resources within and across countries. Therefore, it is important to identify methods and tools that will help State Regulatory Authorities (SRAs) and the operators that support the SSAC to conduct effective self-assessments of their own safeguards performance and ensure that lessons learned inform improvements in organizational performance. Enabling an SSAC to understand why it is performing inefficiently can help it allocate resources more effectively to better support IAEA safeguards implementation. In collaboration with international consulting firm Environmental Resources Management (ERM) and a U.S. based nuclear fuel cycle facility, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) developed a prototype self-assessment tool for nuclear operators and regulators. This presentation will describe the multi-year effort while emphasizing the steps the team took to align the framework with relevant IAEA self-assessment tools. It will also present feedback from an operating facility that tested the prototype tool in 2017. (author)