The Australian Safeguards Support Program: Supporting the IAEA since 1980
For over 40 years, the Australian Safeguards Support Program (ASSP) has made niche contributions to the IAEA's safeguards mission in areas such as developing safeguards technology and approaches, delivering safeguards training, and providing technical services. Under the coordination of ASNO, the ASSP helps the IAEA keep pace with evolving challenges in verification, as well as opportunities from emerging technologies and analytical techniques.
Today, the ASSP is one of 21 programs established by IAEA Member States and the European Commission to assist the Agency to continuously strengthen the effectiveness and improve the efficiency of safeguards. Since the IAEA has limited capacity and facilities for research and development on new safeguards tools, provision of safeguards training, and analysis of samples collected during inspection, the Agency relies heavily on these Member State Support Programs.
The ASSP does not currently have a dedicated budget, instead relying on the dedication of Australian government agencies, ANSTO, CSIRO, other research institutes and universities with specialised expertise. These organisations have forged long-standing and mutually beneficial partnerships with the IAEA.
In 1980, Australia formally announced the establishment of the ASSP (then referred to as the Bilateral Australian Assistance Program) to the IAEA Board of Governors. At the time, Australia contributed to the development of approaches to safeguards inspections for gaseous centrifuge enrichment plants through the Hexapartite Safeguards Project with the IAEA, EURATOM and 5 other IAEA Member States. During the early years of the Program, the Australian Atomic Energy Commission also provided advice to the IAEA on implementation of new technology, including the IAEA's Computerised Safeguards Information System.
Throughout the 1980s, the ASSP peer reviewed papers on the development of criteria for attainment of IAEA inspection goals at nuclear facilities. This enabled the IAEA to plan inspections in a manner that ensures a high probability of detecting diversion of nuclear material while minimising costs and burdens on states, even as the quantity of nuclear material and the number of nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards increases.
Following the revelations regarding the nuclear programs of Iraq and the DPRK in the early 1990s, the IAEA began working with Member States on strengthening safeguards. The ASSP supported the strengthening of safeguards, particularly through Australia's hosting of trials of new safeguards techniques, such as environmental sampling, which is in wide use by IAEA safeguards inspectors today.
As part of the ASSP, Australia has provided expert input to the drafting of the IAEA's Physical Model, a series of volumes first developed in the 1990s to describe the components of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Physical Model acts as a tool for identifying indicators of the existence or development of nuclear activities and for assessing the proliferation significance of questions or inconsistencies arising in safeguards implementation. Experts from ANSTO, ASNO, other government agencies, and private companies have contributed to the development and review of the Physical Model, particularly Volume 1 on uranium mining/milling and Volume 3 on uranium enrichment.
In recent years, the IAEA has also worked with Member States to conduct broad searches of emerging technologies developing outside the traditional safeguards community that could be applied to safeguards practices. In 2013, ASNO invited CSIRO to participate in the IAEA Workshop "Scanning the Horizon: Novel Techniques and Methods for Safeguards" in Vienna. During the workshop the IAEA was particularly interested in CSIRO's recent invention of the Zebedee hand-held 3D laser mapping device. After a period of field testing, the IAEA began using the Zebedee in safeguards inspections in 2016 and it has proven particularly useful for verifying the design of nuclear facilities and calculating volumes of large objects or stockpiles of material.
Top left: The "Zebedee" – a hand-held 3D laser mapping device developed by CSIRO, which the IAEA uses in nuclear safeguards inspections. Top right: A "Zebedee" map of the Opéra-Théâtre de Clermont-Ferrand, used to demonstrate the potential applications of the device. Bottom: In 2017 ASNO brought the IAEA and CSIRO together to conduct the Robotic Challenge, where teams tested their robots' abilities to assist IAEA inspectors in performing safeguards tasks.
CSIRO went on to host the IAEA's crowdsourcing Robotics Challenge in 2017, which saw robotics experts from around the world build their own robots to assist IAEA inspectors by automating lengthy or repetitive verification tasks. CSIRO is now working with the IAEA and the winners of the Robotics Challenges on a control module for a robot designed to verify spent fuel from nuclear reactors (see Output 1.4).
Australia's universities are also playing an important role by conducting research on potential safeguards applications of new technologies, such as blockchain and machine learning. In 2018, a team of researchers at the Faculty of Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW) developed a blockchain (shared ledger) platform for recording nuclear material accounting data based on ASNO's existing centralised NUclear Material Balance and Tracking (NUMBAT) database. Their platform 'Shared-Ledger nUclear Material Balance and Tracking' (SLUMBAT) allowed testers to perform the roles of hypothetical nuclear operators, transporters and regulatory authorities and enter transactions involving hypothetical nuclear material into an encrypted blockchain. It demonstrated potential advantages of blockchain platforms in terms of data integrity, traceability and efficiency in tracking complex chains of transactions for data held among nuclear operators and regulators. Research on the potential applications of blockchain technology for nuclear safeguards information management, nuclear security and export controls is continuing as a partnership between the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), the Stimson Center in the US and UNSW.
Through the ASSP, ANSTO and the University of Western Australia have made long-standing contributions by analysing environmental samples from IAEA inspections, as part of the IAEA's Network of Analytical Laboratories. Australian government agencies, including ASNO, also work with the IAEA regularly on provision of safeguards training (both to the Agency and to other Member States) and on development of safeguards concepts and guidance, particularly within the framework of State-level approaches to safeguards implementation. These and other ongoing ASSP projects are summarised in Output 1.4.
The cooperation between the IAEA, the ASSP and other Member State Support Programs also helps Australia cultivate a core of professionals with expertise in safeguards, as well as related fields such as nuclear forensics. The ASSP has also provided a mechanism for Australia to help shape developments in safeguards, particularly where they may impact Australian industries.
