LOF Management in Australia

Locations outside Facilities (LOFs) hold limited quantities of nuclear material, but States may have many LOF locations to regulate. Often, States have many more LOF locations than nuclear facilities, generating a large administrative volume for the Safeguards Authority, even with a relatively static inventory. The challenge for each Safeguards Authority is to set up infrastructure with processes in place to streamline the regulation and management of nuclear material within LOF locations. Collating and balancing the reports on nuclear material held by many LOF locations can be challenging. In the case of Australia, there are about 110 LOF locations holding over 3,000 batches of nuclear material. It takes the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office (ASNO) about eight person-weeks for each annual reporting campaign, to collate and analyse inventory reports, and then to balance the inventory and inventory changes to close the material balance period. To make this process more efficient, ASNO has a project in place to substantially upgrade its database and permit holder portal called NUclear Material Balance Tracking System (NUMBAT). The first phase of the recently upgraded database addressed many of these challenges in strengthening IT infrastructure and streamlining the process of gathering information. In addition to inventory management, there is also the challenge of managing information flows for Additional Protocol (AP) reporting. Functionality for collating and reporting for the AP is currently not included in NUMBAT, but is planned for later phases of the database development. ASNO uses the IAEA's Protocol Reporter III software for collating information for AP declarations, but the collection of information is done through a combination of permit conditions, paper-based forms, open-source research, and targeted enquiries. This paper will describe the mechanisms ASNO has put in place to streamline this process. (author)