Approaches for increasing the cooperation between Member States and IAEA under SSS

With introduction of the Strengthened Safeguards System (SSS), both the IAEA and Member States are concerned about the limited resources to carry out the SSS activity and the potential increase of additional cost and burdens. Even though the IAEA has recently prepared a procedure of the generalized New Partnership Approach (NPA), its wider application to the general Member States is difficult at the present time. For the generalized NPA necessitates that SSACs of the Member States have sufficient technical capability in safeguards to carry out the necessary activities. Unfortunately a few Member States seem to be qualified to have the sufficient technical capability that the IAEA desires. In this topic, a new approach to increase the cooperation between Member States and IAEA under SSS is proposed such that effective supports can be provided to all of its Member States that are not technically competent in terms of safeguards experience. This is realized by so called 'tunneling effort', meaning that desired goals are accomplished by efforts from both Member States and the IAEA. The Member States having high technical competence in safeguards provide technical assistance to the Member States that are not competent until they attain to a certain level in technical capability, while the IAEA provides the guidelines, and coordinates the process. The formal introduction of the Quality Control concept to the safeguards management is proposed as well so as to efficiently reduce burdens from the implementation of the SSS. (author)