India-United States Cooperation on Global Security Summary of a Workshop on Technical Aspects of Civilian Nuclear Materials Security (2013) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction and Overview of Civilian Nuclear Materials
1 Introduction and Overview of Civilian Nuclear Materials
Pages 7-26
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From page 7... ...
Even countries that do not have fissile materials may be used as transit countries for illicit transport of nuclear materials. Finding a balance between public concerns about nuclear energy and the need for greater electrical capacity is extremely difficult at present.
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Forty-six governments sent delegations to the summit and twenty-nine of them made national commitments to support nuclear security. During the Summit, India announced its commitment to establish a Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership.
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The aims of the workshop were to identify and examine potential areas for substantive scientific and technical cooperation between the two countries on issues related to nuclear material security, to establish scientist-to-scientist contacts between experts in nuclear materials management in the United States and counterparts in India, and to build confidence in cooperation on nuclear security issues. The hope is that if the technical community identifies concrete, technically-based areas for potential future collaboration, these could be the foundation for progress at the Centre and between the two countries more broadly.
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Rajaraman believes that the nuclear summits are an example of international cooperation on nuclear materials security. From an Indian perspective, one of the reasons for the success of the nuclear security summits -- the initial summit in Washington and the second summit in Seoul, Korea in 2011 -- was that the highest level of Indian leadership was invited to participate, setting them on equal footing with nuclear weapons states.
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These challenges increased sharply immediately after the situation with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the tsunami on March 11, 2011. In response to these events in Japan, the local population living near the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu protested by the thousands to prevent the loading of reactor fuel.
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Regardless of these objections, the first fuel was loaded into the reactor vessel and power generation was to begin in December 2012. This situation not only illustrates the difficulties in communicating safety issues surrounding nuclear power, it also illustrates real security concerns.
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India also has small reactors, mostly 220 megawatts and two of them are 540 megawatts, and work has begun on a number of 700-megawatt units of domestic design, four of which are under construction and a total of at least 12 are anticipated.7 Srinivasan concluded by reiterating that India is interested in developing its nuclear industry and producing significantly greater quantities of nucleargenerated electricity, and to do this, India will need to cooperate with international partners, in addition to addressing continuing domestic concerns of safety and security. Planning for Nuclear Energy Expansion while Maintaining Security Ravi Grover noted the challenges of planning for the expansion of nuclear power to support economic growth and an increasing population, much of which is rural.
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Providing energy reliably at affordable prices will continue to be a challenge, as India is not rich in energy resources." According to the 2011 census, India's population is 1.2 billion, and 69 percent of the population lives in rural areas.8 In spite of impressive growth in installed electrical capacity and the fact that globally India ranks fifth in terms of total electricity generation, India's per-capita electricity consumption is well below the world average. Half of rural households have no access to electricity and most of them use biomass energy.9 Grover relayed that DAE studied the growth of energy demand with the objective of quantifying the share of nuclear energy needed in the electricity mix in the coming five decades in India.
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It calls for pursuit of a closed fuel cycle to enable India to tap into vast thorium resources, and become truly energy independent beyond 2050.18 Security of nuclear materials is built into the day-to-day operations of India's nuclear program. Grover defined the open fuel cycle as one which "disposes of spent fuel without extracting plutonium." He stated, "such a disposal would result in the creation of a plutonium mine for posterity," where "the security risk is aggravated if such a disposal is designed to be retrievable." To ensure that there is no buildup of the plutonium stockpile, India is strictly observing the principle of "reprocess to reuse." In India, he noted, the reprocessing of spent fuel and fast 14 Planning Commission (2005)
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In addition to national legislation, India has taken additional obligations under various international mechanisms. Of particular importance for this workshop is the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and its 2005 amendment, the Convention on Nuclear Safety.22 India also participates in the nuclear security summit process.
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Nuclear Material Measurements: Protecting the Public and Increasing Confidence in Safety and Security Peter Santi of Los Alamos National Laboratory focused his remarks on nuclear material measurements and their role in not only nuclear security, but also in nuclear safety, material control and accountability, and, to some degree, in nuclear safeguards. The primary goal of all of these efforts is how to ensure that the public is not harmed by nuclear materials.
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I know whatt it is being useed for or wheree it is being stored and how h it's being stored. I know w it is going tto be leaving tthe facility y to go to the next n place, wheether it be goinng to a fuel fabbrication faciliity, to the nuclear n reactorr to be used, or to a nuclear waste facility that is an apprropriate repository." r While W these thhree principles or objectives have differennt responsibilities associaated with man naging nuclear material, onee area of com mmonality amoong them iss the need to be b able to deteect nuclear maaterial, identifyy it, and quantify how much m is there.
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, fuel fabrication. The uranium oxide powder in various cans will be sintered and turned into fuel pellets, which are loaded into fuel rods that are in bundled into fuel assemblies that make up the reactor core.
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Nondestructive assay measurements can be used to confirm enrichment levels for criticality safety. The amount of material that stayed behind in the equipment used for UF6 conversion to UO2 is known as nuclear material holdup.
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NDA is useful in nuclear material security in multiple ways. For example, if a portal monitor is set off, a nondestructive assay measurement will provide more information about what radioisotope caused the alarm.
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Using technologies and techniques and material control and accounting to balance and complement nuclear security is a way to maintain as much control over the nuclear material as possible, while still being able to use it for its intended purposes. Another important issue to remember when dealing with NDAs is that if improper measurements are performed, if erroneous results are received, if there is an inappropriate error bar, or if errors are not accurate with respect to an item, there may be safety implications, especially criticality safety implications.
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Therefore, in-laboratory or in-field training experiences working with real nuclear materials are important for personnel as they learn techniques and the principles associated with performing these measurements. Effective training programs may be needed to develop or expand a person's knowledge and experience with fundamental physics associated with the specific NDA techniques they will be using.
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This is a difficult and more delicate exercise, but it has to be undertaken if civilian nuclear energy is to survive." A workshop participant asked Santi about the relative accuracy of NDA versus DA measurements. Santi replied that research is constantly being conducted to try to reduce the errors of NDA to near zero, or at least much closer to those of DA.
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From page 25... ...
Realistic situations can then be used as teaching moments, and those are the best ones to have so that students have situational awareness when they perform the measurements. A participant suggested that Indian scientists and experts would be enthusiastic to work with their counterparts from the United States on NDA, and one suggestion provided by a U.S.
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