Nuclear 101: How IAEA Safeguards Work

welcome everybody thanks for tuning in again today we're going to talk agency safeguards work a lot of this is going to be about the technical specifics of how these things work but before starting that let me tell you a little bit about the agency itself it was created in the 1950s after President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech and from the beginning it had more than one mission it carries out inspections at nuclear facilities around the world to make sure that they are only being used for peaceful purposes and that the nuclear material is only being used for peaceful purposes but it also helps promote nuclear energy it helps countries with the uses both of actual nuclear power but also of nuclear and Radiological technologies for health agriculture industry a wide range of different topics and it promotes nuclear safety and nuclear security so it has many different roles today we're only going to be talking about the inspections part the agency is an independent agency it is affiliated with the UN system but the head of the agency the director-general can only be hired and fired by the Board of Governors of the agency itself not by the secretary-general of the United Nations or something like that so it is to some extent independent but like any international organization the IAEA is a creature of its member states if most of the IEA Member States or even a large chunk of the IAEA member states don't want the safeguards or inspection system to go in a particular direction it won't go in that direction so that the IAEA can really only do what the Member States collectively want it to do and those Member States views are expressed through two main decision-making bodies the Board of Governors which is to the IAEA more or less like the Security Council is to the United Nations it's a relatively small group of states with some having permanent seats that make many of the most important decisions and then there's the General Conference which is the body of all of the member states and the vast majority of the countries in the world whether they have nuclear energy or not are members of the International Atomic Energy Agency not all of them but the vast majority okay so let's talk a little bit about how I EA safeguards work first of all let's get some expectations clear about what they do and what they don't do safeguards are intended to provide what they call timely detection of undeclared diversion or production of nuclear material so if a country is trying to get some potential nuclear bomb material in secret safeguards are supposed to notice that but the IEA isn't an army they can't physically prevent a state from doing something that it's prohibited by treaty from doing all they can do is ring an alarm bell they can say this is what's happening and then the international community has to choose what they're going to do about it so if states fear the consequences of detection then the chance that they'd be detected doing something illegal might be enough to deter them from doing it and what one of the main things in Eisenhower's original vision that such inspections were intended to do was to allow international commerce in civilian nuclear technology with some confidence that that civilian nuclear power technology would not be used for nuclear weapons despite the name safeguards are not about providing safety for the facility and they're not about providing guarding for the facility so some people some people who are not very well informed from some countries say why are you worried about the security of my nuclear facility it's under IAEA safeguards all that means is that an inspector might come once a month or something like that it doesn't mean that there's anybody guarding the facility round-the-clock so safeguards doesn't mean safety or guarding so I'm going to start off with some somewhat provocative conclusions a lot of this talk is probably not exactly the way it would be if I were actually working for the International Atomic Energy Agency there's a lot of things about their system that they're sort of not allowed to say in public so first of all one of the somewhat surprising aspects of the system is that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has been fairly successful even though for most of the time that treaty has been in existence the inspection system was actually quite weak and had only a modest ability to detect cheating and so that suggests that there must be something going on behind the success of the treaty that goes beyond just the rational actor solving the collective-action problem because you're all not really completely solving the collective-action problem if one state just because another state as a member of the treaty can't be sure that that other state isn't cheating on its obligations now there are traditional safeguards the way that IAEA did things for many years and there are newer safeguards and I'll talk about both of those kinds of things the traditional safeguards focused primarily on the declared facility the state would say here are my nuclear facilities and the IAEA would go and inspect at those places and those are and that approach offered reasonable though not perfect performance for declared facilities for making sure that states didn't remove nuclear material from the facilities that they had told the IAEA about and allowed the IAEA to inspect they create enough risk of detection that I think for the vast majority of states diverting from a safeguarded inspected facility would not be the favored route toward nuclear weapons the new safeguards approaches combined with information from national intelligence agencies offer some chance a significant chance but not high confidence of detecting covert nuclear material production that is the secret site where a country might be making nuclear material and then turning that nuclear material into a bomb what's called weaponization is quite difficult to detect it can be done in very small facilities and so you can really only find that if the world gets lucky and there's a lot of cooperation between intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency so just to give you a sense of scale the IAEA is inspecting more than more than a thousand facilities or other locations in almost 180 States it's about a hundred and fifty thousand tons of nuclear material that's under safeguards so that's given the types of nuclear material that it is it's about a hundred and eighty three thousand significant quantities that is enough nuclear material for 183 thousand nuclear bombs as the IEA estimates it that's as of the end of 2012 they have something of the order of ten thousand person days of inspection a year they spend in the 2012 budget was almost one hundred and forty seven million euros that is about the same as the budget of the Vienna Police Department for all nuclear inspections worldwide it's really a remarkably small figure given the importance to the security of states all over the world of this inspection system its safeguards are implemented almost entirely in non-nuclear weapon States under the non nuclear non-proliferation treaty so the treaty says if you're a state a non nuclear weapon state you have to inspect inspections of all your nuclear activities whereas you don't if you're a nuclear weapon state however the nuclear weapon states have all entered into what are called voluntary offer agreements where they say well we'll let the IEA inspect some of our facilities and that was in order to reduce the discrimination system between the nuclear weapon States and the non-nuclear weapon states in the United States in the United Kingdom we have the most far-reaching voluntary offer agreements excuse me that say in essence any facility in our country that's not of direct military significance the IAEA can inspect but since the IAEA has limited resources and it's in a certain sense sort of pointless doing a lot of inspections and states that already have nuclear weapons why would they divert a nuclear material from a civilian facility when they already have plenty of nuclear material for their nuclear weapons programs the IEA doesn't actually spend much of its effort on these inspections in nuclear weapon states there's also a few inspections in the few countries outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that are basically at facilities that some other supplier provided and that supplier wanted to have inspections at that facility to make sure that facility at least was not used for those state's nuclear weapons programs but the vast majority of the inspections are in the non-nuclear weapon States and the NPT member states have repeatedly expressed confidence that IAEA safeguards are working and will verify that states are complying with their obligations whether that confidence is well placed as another question all right so if you think about how a state might get nuclear bonds in relation to this inspection system there's really sort of five different pathways one would be I don't sign up to any of the treaties in the first place and so I don't have any requirement to accept inspections and I just build military facilities to produce material for my nuclear weapons so that's how all five of the NPT nuclear weapon states did it that's how India Pakistan and Israel did it though in those latter cases there were some facilities where they had promised other countries will only use them for peaceful purposes that in fact ended up being used for the weapons program another option would be to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to accept the inspections but then when you wanted to build your nuclear weapon to kick out the inspectors pull out of the treaty and say ok I'm shifting these facilities over to military production that's sort of what North Korea did it it did kick out the inspectors but it had never had full IAEA inspections from the beginning and it's one thing people worry a run might do at some point in the future another possibility would be to join the non-proliferation treaty to accept safeguards and then divert material from a declared safeguarded facility so that's really the only one of these pathways that the traditional safeguard system was designed to be able to detect so then you another option would be to join the NPT accept the safeguards at the declared facilities but then have a secret facility off to the side somewhere or maybe more than one secret facility off to the side somewhere where you're really doing your nuclear work and since the inspectors aren't there their traditional safeguard system wasn't really helping with that and that's part of why we have a new and different safeguard system now that includes something called the Additional Protocol which I'll talk about in a moment so Iraq did that establish secret facilities before the 1991 Gulf War North Korea did that with its uranium program Libya did that Syria did that Iran did that initially whether it's doing it today or will in the future remains an open question and then finally rather than having facilities to produce nuclear material you might purchase or steal nuclear material from somewhere else and that's what people worry terrorists might be able to do because it's unlikely they'd be able to produce their own material but also between States for example it's been reported that China provided a substantial amount of highly enriched uranium to Pakistan as well as a nuclear weapons designed to Pakistan for Pakistan's nuclear weapons program so there are really only two of these paths that are the focus of the IAEA safeguard system if you're if you're doing things completely outside the system or you're gonna pull out of the NPT and kick out the inspectors there's nothing that an inspection regime can really do to prevent you from doing that the things the inspection regime can help with are the pads where you're trying to do it in secret either at a declared facility or at a secret facility so let's talk first about traditional safeguards so this was the safeguard system that was established after the nuclear non-proliferation treaty had been negotiated there were a few safeguards in place before the NPT that were basically intended to support nuclear exports where an exporter would say I will show you this reactor but only if it has inspectors to make sure you're only using it for peaceful purposes but most of the safeguards came into being when the nuclear non-proliferation treaty came into being they use what they call material accountancy that is trying to count all of the nuclear material and make sure all the stuff that was there before it is still there and nothing has been diverted and then also containment and surveillance which basically means you know putting a lock or a seal on it having a camera watching it so that if it were removed you might know about it so some important terms they're looking for timely detection and that IEA has particular standards for how good as timely based in part on what their estimates of what they call conversion times that is how long would it take a state to go from material in a particular form to make that into nuclear weapons they're looking for significant quantities which in the IEA's view is the amount that would likely be needed for a first nuclear weapon taking into account that the first one is likely to be in an inefficient one and that there's likely to be some waste and scrap in the manufacturing process and so on and they're looking to deter the diversion of those significant quantities by the risk of detection so the significant quantities are here on this slide there are eight kilograms in the case of plutonium or uranium 233 we haven't really talked much about uranium 233 it's a it's another potential bomb material you can make it from thorium in the same way that you make plutonium from uranium 238 or in the case of highly enriched uranium uranium 235 is not quite as reactive as plutonium 239 and so you need a larger amount of material so the significant quantity there is not 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium it's 25 kilograms of the u-235 that's in the highly enriched uranium so if you're highly enriched uranium was only half uranium-235 for example it was 50% enriched with the rest uranium 238 then it would take 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium before it would be before would have 25 kilograms of uranium-235 in it and be a significant quantity now one issue is the reality is bombs can be made with smaller amounts of material the Nagasaki bomb for example had about 6 kilograms of plutonium rather than the 8 kilograms that's a significant quantity and you know weapons design has improved since then and become more efficient so they have a timeliness goal for various kinds of material as I mentioned and that goal for plutonium separated plutonium that's not in spent fuel but it's separated ready to go for use in a nuclear weapon or a highly enriched uranium is about a month now unfortunately that's longer than the II's own estimate of the conversion time that the time it would take to make that material into a nuclear bomb but I just in terms of resources having inspections that were much more timely than that would be difficult all right so traditional safeguards are based on the safeguards agreement for the NPT as I said that's known as information circular one five three or in circ there's a huge number of IAEA documents that are referred to as in circ with some number and in circ was negotiated at a time when nuclear energy was really expected to grow enormously it was expected to be the answer to mankind's energy future and so almost all countries were thinking they're gonna have nuclear energy and it's gonna be a key element of their national economy and so the non-nuclear weapon states were concerned to make sure that safeguards wouldn't be so onerous that they would put them at a economic disadvantage a competitive disadvantage compared to the nuclear weapon states that didn't have to accept these safeguards so you will find a lot of the language in insert 1 5 3 is about non-interfering not slowing down state's nuclear energy activities and so on and it limits the IAEA to the minimum information it needs to carry out its responsibilities mostly verification only add a few strategic points within declared facilities I should say that even this traditional agreement does give the IAEA the right to what are called special inspections at other undeclared places if the IEA determines that such a special inspection is needed for it to be able to fulfill its responsibilities under its safeguards agreement with the state the reality is that I carried that out only very very very rarely and the procedures were such that it would be a long time in between when the state knew that you wanted to carry out an end at a particular place and when the inspection might actually happen and therefore the potentially the opportunity for covering things up before the inspectors arrived was potentially substantial the result of this initial safeguards agreement that has such a focus on doing the minimum and not interfering is that it there was a culture at the IAEA for some time of really not asking too many questions of being an accountant and going and saying okay you declare do you have this much material I see it's here here and here okay I've checked the box I'm going home although that's an overgeneralization there are contrary cases that exist one that unfortunately has never really been written up very well is the Taiwan case but I won't really go into that very much more so the fundamental safeguards measure for traditional safeguards is material accountancy so you're trying to look for material unaccounted for or mufe so you look at well how much did the facility have to start with that's the beginning inventory plus how much they produced or got from elsewhere so the additions to that beginning inventory and then you have what they had at the end - any removals things they might have shipped someplace else or nuclear material that went to waste or whatever and in theory those out of balance and the difference between them if there is a difference is the material unaccounted for or the MOC these days sometimes muff is referred to as inventory differences because among other things sometimes it can be rather than the difference being negative there's too little materials sometimes the difference is positive there's too much material there's more than you expect and that's partly because of measurement uncertainties just as if you were running a bakery and baking a ton of bread every month it would be very difficult to make sure a few pounds of flour here and there didn't go missing it's the same thing with nuclear material only obviously it's much more important to make sure that a few kilograms go missing so when you have these uncertainties there's sort of Wiggles in the measurement the question is does it is it just measurement uncertainty or is there a real loss there so they look at the standard deviation of them off that is is the muff bigger than you would normally expect at this particular facility and if the muff is above some particular threshold say three times the standard deviation then the iaea rejects the hypothesis that the real Moff is zero that is that there isn't anything missing and investigates the possibility that some form of diversion has occurred now if you have an item facility where you've just got solid objects you can just count them and say okay the declaration says there are six and there's one two three four five six I'm done so normally there the muff should be zero unless something is missing so measurements aren't perfect these are some of the International Accounting Standards for what the standard deviation should be in percentage so you rate it for a uranium enrichment plant you can usually get down to something like 0.2% but for a scrap store or a waste or you can see the measurement uncertainties are often quite high all right so then in addition to taking these measurements you want to have containment and surveillance so those help safeguards by number one detecting unusual activity so if you've got a camera in the area where the nuclear material is and it's nighttime and there's no not supposed to be any workers there and somebody is coming in and doing something that tells you something unusual that's going on you probably ought to look into it it also helps you confirm that nothing has been removed since the last time you inspected so if you put material in a box and have a seal on the box and the seal hasn't been broken since the last time you were there then you usually conclude I don't have to realize there said they use surveillance cameras they use tamper-resistant seals and they use tamper resistant tags to identify a particular item one issue is experts in the United States and some other countries have concluded that a number of the commercially available tags and seals can actually be defeated if you're clever and often not very long using not a whole lot of equipment so you need to be careful about how much you rely on the tags and seals working all the time so what happens for example when a seal breaks seals do break by themselves sometimes you know you're moving stuff around something gets slammed against the wall or whatever the seals smashed so then often you have to go in and Riaan specs and make sure that that breakage didn't wasn't associated with somebody actually removing material so they containment and surveillance clearly contributes to the confidence you have in safeguards but with a can't see you can actually do statistical analysis to see what your your confidence is that something hasn't been removed and clearly containment and surveillance adds to that conference but nobody's ever come up with a good mathematical approach to saying well how much does it add to that confidence so you're not measuring any everything like a bank auditor you're sort of taking a sample you examine the records you take a statistical sample of the material in a modern automated facility the OEE might often rely on the operators own measuring equipment to take its measurements and the measurements would be going on continuously but they're then you have a real premium on validating the measurements taken by that operator equipment making sure that operator equipment isn't lying to the inspector so ultimately you need to find ways where the inspector makes an independent judgment and not simply believes what the operator says the difference between what the operators measurement said and what the II's measurements say is referred to as Mufti the difference of Moff all right so if you think about it from a declared facility there's really four ways you might divert you might divert into the muff by just removing material knowing that that records will show that there's missing material and saying gee I don't know where that material went so there's no attempt to falsify the records or what have you you might divert into the muff D you might say you might falsify your own records knowing that the IE es measurements will show something different than your records show and say gee I don't know why your measurements show a different number than my measurements show you might divert with some attempt to tamper with the II's measurements so if the OEE was taking a sample of plutonium solution and you knew that there was less plutonium in that solution then there ought to be because he'd removed some you might try to put a little more into their samples that it looked like there was more in the solution that we're measuring than there actually was and then and the last one is diversion with some plausible disruption of safeguards you might say oh goodness you know all the cameras and records got destroyed when we had that far and so I don't know where that plutonium went when the fire happened so the most difficult kinds of places to safeguard are the ones that are handling huge amounts of material in bulk processing processes and one canonical example is a large reprocessing plant so a big plant like the one the Japanese have built at Mikasa processes something like 800 metric tons heavy metal or MTH em every year of spent nuclear fuel and since the spent nuclear fuel is about one percent by weight plutonium that's about 8 tons of plutonium now they do one usually a typical plant they might do one complete closeout where they clean out all the material and all the pipes and everything a year and with about a 1% uncertainty in those measurements but so that 1% uncertainty if you're doing 8 tons of plutonium a year is 80 kilograms of plutonium so that's 10 significant quantities so that's a problem and particularly if you're only challenging if you've got three standard deviations that would be 240 kilograms of plutonium also you can't meet a one-month time in this goal obviously if you're only having a closeout once every year so what the IAEA does is they have comprehensive transparency and containment and surveillance throughout the plant monitoring the various flows through the plant having cameras to make sure that you aren't shifting a pipe from one part of a plant to another to siphon off some nuclear material they actually have sort of laser imaging systems that take a complete 3d image of the inside of the piping and all of that kind of stuff and then they come do it again to make sure nothing has changed and they have what's called near-real-time accountancy so they try to take frequent even if somewhat partial measurements of the material as it's being processed rather than only the one closeout measurement once a year this is just to give you an idea this is an old reprocessing plant in the United States you can see there are a lot of pipes figuring out where every single pipe is going is a very non-trivial task alright so let's talk about some examples traditional safeguards Iran is obvious and topical one so before their enrichment plant at Natanz was revealed they had an eighteen-year centrifuge program that was not declared to the IAEA and was not detected by traditional safeguards they imported hundreds of kilograms of uranium from China without reporting it to the eye and I didn't raise any issues or objections for more than a decade they converted hundreds of kilograms of uranium to metal and metal is only used for a very few civilian purposes it's mainly used for making nuclear weapons components they weren't yet ready to make nuclear weapons components but they were apparently learning how to work with uranium metal and there was no reporting of that no detection of that for years they conducted the real centrifuge tests with uranium hexafluoride definitely something that had to be under safeguards if they were complying with their agreement they lied to the IAEA and said they hadn't ever done that was detected years later so this was one of the problems with the way things used to be in safeguards only looking at the declared activities however when other sources Iranian resistance groups intelligence agencies of the United States and other countries inform the IAEA of what was happening the IEA has done a very professional job with that information of going in and doing inspections at quite a number of different places and sir peeling back one layer after another of Iranian lies and false declarations hopefully in the future we will not have false declarations anymore but we definitely did from a run in the past so just to give you an idea let me talk a little bit about safeguards at centrifuge enrichment plants one of the most proliferation sensitive kinds of facilities so this is the sort of shape of cascade for a centrifuge enrichment plant its thickest at the middle where the feed goes in it's a little bit thinner down at the end where the tails the waste product come out of the cascade we talked about enrichment before in class and then it's very thin out at the product end where the actual enriched material comes out now you would think that at a such centrifuge plant you'd have continuous monitoring of the feed going in you'd have continuous monitoring of the tails coming out you'd have continuous monitoring of the products coming out maybe you'd have continuous monitoring of the flow and the enrichment level within the within the Cascade you'd have cameras at key points and you'd have environmental sampling within the plant to detect highly enriched uranium I'll talk more about environmental sampling a moment what you actually have is significantly less than that you have the operator declares when there is feed to be measured when there's product to be measured when there's tails to be measured you don't have continuous measurements of those you'd come and measure them when the operator says there's something to measure and then you have what's called limited frequency unannounced access or LF you a within the cascade hall to detect if there are unusual changes if they've changed the piping around to go from making low enriched uranium to highly enriched uranium or something like that and then you have do have environmental sampling every once in a while to detect if there are highly enriched uranium particles in that building which there would certainly be if they were enriching highly enriched uranium at Natanz you also have more cameras than you have it some other enrichment facilities - partly because at Natanz since they're still building the facility they're bringing large objects in and out and so you have to have more monitoring for the unusual activity then you have it a fully complete enrichment plant so Iran reports to the IAE on the feed to the enrichment Cascades the product the tails the IEA has these containment and surveillance measures including the cameras they have unannounced inspections I use unannounced advisedly they advise the inspectors live in Isfahan which is some hours drive from the tons so that Iran knows Wow ahead of time when there's going to be inspection not a long time ahead of time roughly once a month those unannounced inspections those check to make sure they haven't changed the pipes around a they take swipe samples these environmental samples to detect particles of hgu but the analysis of those samples as I'll mention in a bit takes weeks then only once a year did they do an actual measurement of all the material on hand so in late 2008 there was a little bit of a hullabaloo when they found more product and less tails than Iran had declared but that declaration was Iran's estimate and the correction of it was done by Iran not by ie inspectors way no one actually sat down and measured the material as a high post having estimated it previously and found that there was more product than they had thought all right so are these questions would the IEA detected if the highly enriched uranium if Iran tried to produce highly enriched uranium into tons I'd say almost certainly yes on the other hand it could take weeks to detect debate it in the IAEA Iran would attempt to explain it confirm it etc and as Iran adds more and more centrifuges the time required for them to make enough material for a bomb may slip below the time-life but it'd be required for the IAEA to detect it so that's one concern would IAEA detect additional low enriched uranium production at Natanz there I think the answer is probably rather than almost certainly and Leu might be useful to Iran because if they had a secret stock low enriched uranium then they could use that at a secret facility to produce highly enriched uranium whereas if all that all their low enriched uranium is under safeguards then somebody would notice if they took it away from safeguards to use it at a secret facility so the reality is implementation of something like this all over the world is never perfect so there are at that time this is from the 2002 safeguards implementation report unfortunately these safeguards implementation reports are not routinely made public this one happened to be made public or they some of the facts from it by the Iranian ambassador to the IEA making the point that Iran is not the only country that has issues so they had 34 facilities in 15 States where they would not have been able to detect a version of a significant quantity with the desired level of confidence 32 facilities in 15 States where they wouldn't have been able to do that detection fast enough six facilities where the quantity goal hadn't been met for years and so on alright so let's talk a bit about the new safeguards measures how do we confirm not just that there's no diversion from declared facilities but that there's no secret undeclared facilities so the key is really integrating information from many sources open source information newspapers visitors accounts that kind of thing I'll talk about that more intelligence information provided by member states new requirements for declarations of all relevant imports and exports fuel cycle R&D and so on and expanded access to more locations including for environmental sampling so this really came in significant part from the discoveries in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War inspectors found that in fact Iraq had had a major nuclear weapons program at that time so there's sort of two different periods before 91 US intelligence thought they had a little nuclear weapons program and it turns out they had a big nuclear weapons program and then from 91 to 2003 US intelligence made the opposite mistake and thought they had continued their nuclear weapons program when they had but it was undetected by this fairly large program was undetected by traditional safeguards that only partly detected as I meant by US intelligence had huge undeclared facilities they had some secret activities even at the declared sites the UN Security Council then imposed an unprecedented inspection regime essentially an Anytime Anywhere inspection regime on Iraq after they were defeated in the 91 war and that gave the IAEA a chance to test out a lot of new inspection approaches so then the member states of the IAEA started working together and they negotiated a two-part approach one was a set of measures that they thought the IEA could carry out using the legal authorities had already had under existing safeguards agreements excuse me and then they also initiated a new agreement what they called in a protocol additional two safeguards agreements or Additional Protocol that would give the IAEA new legal authorities and there even before the Additional Protocol the IAEA even under the traditional agreements always had both the right and the obligation the legal requirement not only to check that declarations were correct that is if they said there are five objects in this room there are five objects in that room but also that they're complete if they say that's the only room that is the only room and there isn't another room over here that has a bunch of nuclear material but the tools they had available before the Additional Protocol really weren't adequate to deal with the completeness question so the Additional Protocol is a new agreement states have to sign up to it one by one and there's an effort to make that sort of the standard for safeguards verification around the world not yet quite there but working on it it includes gives the IAEA access to more information states have to report more about their nuclear programs including their research and development activities it gives the IAEA access to more locations including more opportunities to go to locations other than the ones the state has declared and it has better procedures for inspections so you can get the inspector in quicker with less time in between when that state knows you're coming and when the inspector arrives most but not all states with significant nuclear activities are now participating 114 states have additional protocols and force out of a hundred and seventy nine states that have safeguards agreements there's some important outliers Iran being an obvious one Syria Egypt Brazil and Argentina the state level concept is and the broader conclusion are sort of the goal these kinds of things so in the old days the OEE looked at two declared facilities and asked his material removed from those facilities now the IE is asking a totally different question they're asking the question does the overall picture of nuclear activities in this state seem to make sense for example are they producing a lot of nuclear material that doesn't seem relevant for the nuclear facilities that they've declared that would raise a question are they importing a bunch of things that other states are reporting to us that they're not telling us about that would raise an obvious question are there facilities that there seem to be mysterious gaps in time and what they were doing where they appeared not to do anything for a couple of years now would raise an obvious question there was one case for example of a nuclear research facility that had been publishing you know a couple journal articles every year for a couple of decades and then suddenly stopped publishing and it raised the obvious question is you know what are they doing now is there something secret going on at that facility as it turned out the answer was yes so based on their state level analysis with all the information they can get wide variety of sources the OEE then draws what they call the broader conclusion which is that all nuclear material in the state remains in peaceful activities so they've drawn that conclusion 460 states so far but there is a debate as to whether they really have the information they need to draw that conclusion they can certainly draw a conclusion that there isn't any evidence to the contrary but as Don Rumsfeld used to tell us absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence so there's some debate as to whether they really ought to be so forcefully drawing the conclusion that they really know that all the nuclear material in the state isn't peaceful activities so one key source of information that they use now is open source information there's lots of different kinds they commercial satellite photographs news stories journal articles conference papers trade data they get now through the Additional Protocol information about imports exports they can try to match those up they also are starting to get information from companies about attempts to buy things that seem suspicious that sometimes you can get information from social media at these days but now there's this torrent of information and so figuring out how to integrate all of that information and look for the needles and the haystacks is a difficult task for the IAEA they also do receive intelligence from member states they don't you know not every member state has intelligence not every intelligence agency is willing to share especially since the IEA is an international organization so as staff from countries all over the world including staff from countries you might be worried about countries are worried about that II's ability to protect secret information so on and then some of the member states that don't have big intelligence agencies worried that you know maybe there's false information going to the IE yeah especially post after the fiasco in 2003 in a when the United States said absolutely there all these nuclear activities and chemical activities and biological activities that we know where they are as Don Rumsfeld famously said and Internet it was all incorrect so what the IEA does with this information is they use it as pointers as hints of where to lock they they usually don't however actually conduct an inspection solely based on intelligence information unless they have some other information that can seems to confirm what they're getting from the intelligence information I'm not going to read this out this is a quote from Hassan rouhani who's now president of Iran when he shortly after he was chief nuclear negotiator and he basically describes how they had a quite a number of activities they meant to keep secret and the IAEA kept finding out about them from open source so it's a quite an amazing testimony from the point of view of the inspected state as to how effective ia open-source activities are environmental monitoring is another very important new safeguards technique all nuclear facilities no matter how well contained release some atoms of plutonium and uranium which can in principle be detected and in particular if you're inside the building if you can take a swipe from the wall swipe from the floor or swipe from the piece of equipment that will almost always reveal in detail what isotopic mix of uranium or plutonium was processed in that building sometimes you can take samples from kilometer away pine needles soil and so on and still detect telltale traces of plutonium in highly enriched uranium centrifuge plants are harder to find than reprocessing plants and there's a quote here from the office of Technology Assessment saying might be quite difficult to detect a decently designed centrifuge plant so if you think about how to find a covert centrifuge plate it's a hard job these are relatively small don't use a whole lot of power so the heat is more or less negligible not likely to detect that the electricity supply maybe you could detect that but it's it's quite modest and might even be provided by diesel generators not hooked up to the National Grid at all sighs pretty small could fit in this building there are lots of buildings that are big enough deliveries of uranium hexafluoride not likely you could conceivably deliver all of a year's supply in one truck rhenium emissions conceivable but you know as I just mentioned if you have good filters it's hard to find unless you really know where you want to lock so you can get within a few hundred meters of the facility you're not likely to find it one of the Iraqi facilities at Tarr Mia had triple HEPA filters to try to make sure nothing got out procurement is crucial so a lot of how we've noticed undeclared activities in countries is by the things they're trying to buy from other countries to supply those activities but then once you know that they're trying to buy the stuff so you still have to figure out where the place is that they're sending the stuff once they buy it some people have talked about you know you might be able to hear the spinning or there might even be an electromagnetic signal from the spinning of the centrifuges but you can't detect that from very far away you have to know exactly where they're like so what the ie is now doing is trying to integrate the old traditional safeguards and the new safeguards and the goal in not only to make the system more effective but also to make it more efficient so if you have more confidence from the new measures maybe you can reduce the old measures a little bit and in fact in negotiating the Additional Protocol the IAEA essentially promised that there wouldn't be a long term net increase in safeguards expenditure so that would mean every extra dollar you spent on the new measures ultimately you'd cut a dollar from the traditional measures so that does create some concern and some people worry that we'll cut so much from the traditional matter measures we'll end up actually the weaker system rather than a stronger system so one example is of sort of expanded safeguards is the safeguards at Isfahan and then the work to try to figure out what Iran was doing about weapons design so until fairly recently the IEA didn't safeguard conversion plants that took uranium that you had mined and milled and converted it into uranium hexafluoride for enrichment but if you think about it having a secret stock of uranium hexafluoride would be the key for having your secret centrifuge enrichment facilities so the IEA concluded we've got a safeguard Isfahan for that reason and there's no way we're gonna be able to safeguard Isfahan unless we safeguard other countries conversion plants as well because the principle of safeguards is that it ought to be in general non-discriminatory so they've recently started safeguards at conversion facilities and they do have full safeguards at Isfahan it's not obvious how soon a substantial amount of uf6 being diverted would really be detected or whether a covert conversion plant would produce a new f6 not under safeguards would be detected now in the last decade or so that ie has been looking into what it gently refers to and its report says the alleged studies these are a series of activities that appear to have been a program to design a nuclear weapon and also to test some aspects of that design and one for example carried out a test involving a hemisphere of explosives with microsecond timing of the detonation at different points to crush a sphere you know that is a good description of an implosion nuclear weapon design Iran argues it was for explosive production of nano and that is something that the Russian nuclear weapons designer who is helping them with that project has been working on but it's pretty clear that that's technology that's directly applicable to nuclear weapons design and in fact the explosive production of nano diamonds came right out of the Soviet nuclear weapons program which is where the guy who was helping them came from it was an implosion systems designer at one of the major Russian nuclear weapons labs so the NPT is not very explicit as to what's prohibited it prohibits Iran from manufacturing or otherwise acquiring nuclear weapons but we're in the chain of building and testing a component or designing it starts getting into manufacturing or otherwise acquiring is a hotly debated topic and traditional safeguards and even the Additional Protocol really focus on nuclear material so if you're doing all of these tests and experiments and designs without actually using any uranium or plutonium in principle the IAEA has very limited legal authority but the IEA has emphasized that it does have a legal obligation to confirm the exclusively peaceful use of Iran's nuclear material and that in order to confirm that it needs information about these weaponization activities because they call into question the exclusively peaceful years so it has not asserted we have the right to inspect for weaponization but it has asserted we have an obligation to confirm exclusively peaceful use and in order to if we were to be able to do that you would have to tell us what we want to know about this weaponization program there's been a total deadlock on that for several years I've been going on for quite a while now so I'll try to try to race through some of the rest of this material so there's some lessons from the Iran case this is first of all these issues are not just safeguards issues there are issues of high politics and international security secondly if I gets the right access the right resources and the right political backing it can be highly effective Hans Blix when he was head of the IAEA used to say I can do my job if you give me access to three things information locations and the Security Council however it's clear that a determined state can ignore legal requirements there have been a series of legally binding Security Council resolutions and Iran has said we think those resolutions are illegitimate and we're gonna ignore them as with some of the other cases we've looked at in this class there are two different nuclear issues with Iran there's an issue of compliance are they complying with or violating their safeguards obligations or there are non clif eration treaty obligations and there's an issue of capability do they have capabilities for enrichment at Natanz or for plutonium production at Arak that raised doubts and would offer a rapid option for building nuclear weapons another lesson that I think is that military strikes would carry huge cross and risks we'll talk about that more later in the course and that a diplomatic solution probably is going to require a combination of sanctions and incentives but it has to address Iran's concerns as well as the West's concerns and it's going to be difficult to achieve given the level of distrust that exists so if you ask our safeguards effective I would say there's both good news and bad news on the good news side in Iraq after 1991 with this extraordinary inspection regime imposed by the United Nations Security Council the inspections did exactly what we hope international inspections would do the purpose of inspections is to deter cheating by the risk of timely detection and the fear of what would be the result of detection and that's the post 2003 u.s. investigation that found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq found that that's exactly what had happened Saddam was deterred because he feared the inspectors would find if he kept the nuclear program going the picture provided by that IAEA was much more accurate than the picture provided by US intelligence which was almost entirely false Iran similarly after the illicit activities were revealed the OEE has done a very professional job pushing through one cover story after another North Korea when OEE inspections first began the North Koreans thought they had cleaned up their reprocessing plant before allowing the inspectors in but I took samples that detected that they were lying about when and how often they had conducted reprocessing but there's bad news as well in Iraq before 1991 ie didn't detect anything and totally missed a huge nuclear weapons program in Iran I really didn't ask the tough questions until it was embarrassed by the revelation of that Iran was building this large enrichment facility at Natanz and it still has quite a modest ability to find covert activities without being told about them by intelligence agencies so for finding those kinds of things the world is still very reliant on intelligence agencies but there is a useful combination in that intelligence agencies have access to all sorts of resources that IEA will never have but the IAEA has the ability to go and have a legal right to go and check on the ground and so those each have their role the other bad news is even at declared facilities if you have these large bulk facilities it's it's very difficult to really confirm that even one significant quantity only 8 kilograms of plutonium out of maybe eight tons that are being processed every year hasn't gone missing there's a budget issue the IAEA safeguards budget as I mentioned is under a hundred and fifty million euros a year a few years ago it got its first increase in 15 years despite giant increases in the number of countries of safeguards agreements the number of facilities under safeguards the quantities of material under safeguards I was just updating this talk from just three years ago and had to substantially increase those numbers for the for this talk the Fed has long since been trimmed out of the system and so they need more resources there's no doubt in my mind on that key states on the board of governors have grudgingly gone along with very small increases in recent years but there's still a ways to go and this year even the United States was initially put opposing any increase so let me end with some key issues an obvious issue is what to do about states that simply refused to join up to the system or comply with this system Iraq pre 2003 North Korea etc how to detect the secret hidden facilities even with the Additional Protocol for still an issue how to ensure no diversion from the big complex facilities like the reprocessing plant the inadequate budget and resources non-discrimination is still an issue in principle in the old days the inspections went where the material was and so if state had complex nuclear activities that had to have a lot of inspections and most of the inspection resources went to states like Japan Germany and Canada which most people are not very worried about with the state level approach they're trying to rebalance and focus inspection resources on those countries where there are questions outstanding and the overall picture doesn't seem to add up but there's some pushback you know art is that just a mechanism for being discriminatory and saying we're gonna just inspect in countries that we think are suspicious and then who gets to decide what country is suspicious and so on and how to address the political disputes among member states there it's a very political situation in the board of governors often between nuclear weapon states and non-nuclear weapon States between developing countries and developed countries between different groupings and different regions but there are opportunities and there are opportunities that I think create some really exciting potential career opportunities for people interested in these fields we need a redoubled global effort on security for nuclear material we need to provide new fuel cycle supply assurances to convince states that they don't need reprocessing or enrichment plants of their own we need a fissile cutoff a treaty that would end production of plutonium in a highly enriched uranium for weapons that might double or even triple the quantity of nuclear inspections worldwide that would be required we need to work on integrating the traditional and the new safeguards measures and we need to just to strengthen safeguards while reducing their cost and so that really does provide opportunities for a whole new generation of safeguards experts all right I'm gonna stop there thank you for tuning in

Channel: Belfer Center

Views: 31,977

Keywords: International Atomic Energy Agency (Membership Organization), nukes, matt bunn, managing the atom, IAEA Safeguards, matthew bunn, belfer center, william tobey, harvard, harvard kennedy school, Nuclear Physics (Field Of Study), nuclear weapons, Nuclear Weapon (Film Subject), Nuclear Power (Industry), Nuclear Weapons And The United States (Literature Subject)

Id: hQ-WSC-D-yw

Length: 63min 43sec (3823 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 06 2014