Drawing from experience of safeguarding French Pu-handling facilities

Full text: COGEMA operates in France for several years several large Pu-handling facilities: a reprocessing plant: La Hague, and two MOX fuel fabrication facilities : MELOX and Cadarache. Those plants are safeguarded and the operator has gone to great length to allowing inspectorates to perform their duty with a maximum efficiency. While integrated safeguards is how to strengthen with a maximum efficiency, the current safeguarding of those facilities has already been designed in this very same objective. One of the key findings from experience is: the importance of inspectors knowledgeable of the plants and well informed on the specificity of those type of plants; the importance of continuous or nearly continuous presence of the inspectors on the site, allowing an intimate understanding of the facility, and a quick response to would-be anomalies; the enhanced transparency through the willingness of the operator to supply a lot of daily information on material management and making accessible to the inspectors some on-line data; those data shall be treated automatically to help the inspector; but the inspector must then make a judgement and a detailed analysis; the 'unannounced factor' in determining what to control on a given day, or the actual performance or not of a planed inspection, the limit being to avoid disturbing the smooth industrial operation of the plant. Those elements shall allow to reduce some costly measures such as sample taking or sample analyses. (author)