Abstract

The problem of non-proliferation has changed from the confrontation between superpowers to the competition between state or non-state groups (proliferators), and the organizations in charge for safeguarding and monitoring nuclear activities (safeguarders). The need for scientific and technical knowledge of the new nuclear threats is fundamental to inform policy decisions and to frame regulations that will reduce the proliferation risk. The high level objective of the framework presented for this contest is to support the peaceful and secure deployment of nuclear energy by increasing the proliferation resistance of future energy systems. The current surge of interest in nuclear energy calls to resolve the concerns about the appropriateness of the current nuclear non-proliferation regulatory framework for new threats challenging nuclear energy systems. Over the last decades, countries adhering to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) confronted the international community by building concealed facilities, by manipulating the configuration of their power plants, and by diverting material from their nuclear sites. Strengthening the current non-proliferation regime, it is then needed to guarantee high standards of security for the sites that store, produce, or transform special nuclear materials. One way to achieve this goal is to avail of new tools and appropriate methods for evaluating the non-proliferation risk of nuclear energy systems. In the last three years I have been in charge for to the development of a framework to assess the proliferation resistance of nuclear energy systems promoted by the US DOE. In November 2010 this project is going to finish and by then I will conclude a non-proliferation framework that I developed inspiring to the safety framework that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission plan to use to use to license the safety of future NES. The result obtained so far favorably demonstrate the possibility to assess the level of security of NES with probabilistic models and the allow scoring their relative proliferation resistance following acceptance criteria that we developed during this study. It is my conviction that this work has the potential to generate valuable tools and criteria that policy makers and regulators can use to assist their decision, and that can help the designers implementing systems less vulnerable to the proliferation risk and to nuclear terrorism.

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