TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT ON THE DUPIC SAFEGUARDS SYSTEM

A safeguards system has been developed since 1993 in the course of supporting a fuel cycle process to fabricate CANDU fuel with spent PWR fuel (known as Direct Use of PWR spent fuel In CANDU, DUPIC). The major safeguards technology involved here was to design and fabricate a neutron coincidence counting system for process accountability, and also an unattended continuous monitoring system in association with independent verification by the IAEA. This combined technology was to produce information of nuclear material content and to maintain knowledge of the continuity of nuclear material flow. In addition to hardware development, diagnosis software is being developed to assist data acquisition, data review, and data evaluation based on a neural network system on the IAEA C/S system