ADDRESSING THE ADEQUACY OF IAEA SAFEGUARDS
Introduction
- Established in 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has 3 main pillars: Safety&Security;
Science&Technology; Safeguards&Verification. It sets standards for the protection of lives, property and
environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation and helps Member States in their implementation. It
encourages and assists Member States in research&development and use of nuclear energy and applications. It
monitors that all the nuclear material and activities remain in peaceful use.
- IAEA has General Conference comprised of all Member States, which meets annually, as its highest policy
body. The Board of Governors as its governing body with 35 members elected by the Conference on a 2-year
term meets 5 times a year. The Director General is chief administrative officer of the IAEA. It seat is in Vienna.
- The Treaty on non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was adopted on 12 June 1968, by the United Nations
General Assembly. It has entered into force on the 05 March 1970. Up to now, the NPT has 190 States Parties.
The NPT delegates the authority to the IAEA to conduct safeguards, an extensive set of technical measures by
which the IAEA Secretariat independently verifies the correctness and the completeness of the declarations
made by States about their nuclear material and activities.
- Very broadly speaking, there are three types of safeguard measures: Traditional (measures related to the
nuclear verification performed at locations where States have declared nuclear material subject to safeguards);
Strengthening (measures under the legal authority conferred by existing safeguards agreements and/or
measures under the complementary Additional Protocols concluded on the basis of the Model Additional
Protocol) and Integrated (combination of all safeguards measures available to the Agency, including those from
the Additional Protocol).
- According to their legal base, safeguard activities can be divided into three categories: Voluntary offer
agreements (for Nuclear Weapon States, as recognized by the NPT); the “standard” agreements (as described
above) and the “Item specific safeguards” agreements (such as tripartite IAEA-USA-Israeli agreement, which
obliges Israel (a State non Party to the NPT) to use equipment, devices and materials made available by the US
solely for peaceful purposes and authorizes the US to conduct safeguards in Israel on behalf of the IAEA).
Does it work?
- Non-nuclear-weapon states party to the NPT are required to conclude comprehensive safeguards agreements
(CSAs) with the Agency within eighteen months of becoming party to the Treaty. It is obvious that the Agency
has no ability to implement safeguards in States without safeguards agreements.
- The weakness of the NPT regime lay in the fact that no obvious diversion of material was involved. The
uranium used as fuel can come from indigenous sources, and the key nuclear facilities concerned could be built
by the countries themselves without being declared to the IAEA or placed safeguards arrangements.
Additionally to this:
-- restrictions on inspector access — under traditional safeguards IAEA inspectors could access only
defined strategic points at declared nuclear facilities (and certain locations outside facilities). In all these cases
some undeclared activities had been undertaken on safeguarded sites, but away from the strategic points where
inspectors could go;
-- lack of detection techniques — e.g. until the introduction of environmental sampling (see below) it
was very difficult to detect activities such as small-scale plutonium separation;
-- IAEA culture — a “checklist” approach to inspections had evolved, with inspectors not being trained
to look beyond the obvious. This, combined with the access restrictions already mentioned, led to many
inspectors having a narrow perception of their duties.
-- NPT requires NNWS Parties to accept IAEA safeguards on all their nuclear material, and to follow
IAEA safeguards procedures. There have been five cases, all involving undeclared plutonium separation
(reprocessing) or uranium enrichment activities, where the IAEA Board of Governors has found that the state
was in non-compliance with its safeguards agreement, and reported the non-compliance to the Security Council
in accordance with the IAEA Statute: Iraq in 1991, DPRK in 1993, Libya 2004 and Iran.
Examples:
Libya in the past and Iran is still involved, inter alia, reprocessing experiments - fuel or targets had been
irradiated in safeguarded research reactors, and hot cells used for plutonium separation were at declared sites. In
some cases the material used had been exempted from safeguards by the IAEA at the state's request. Although
the experiments were small-scale, they were significant because they indicated intent to use the experience
gained for more substantial unsafeguarded activities. Iraq, Libya and Iran were found, inter alia, to have
undertaken uranium enrichment R&D using undeclared nuclear material at undeclared sites. In addition, they
had established, or were well advanced with, substantial enrichment capabilities at undeclared sites. Finally
Libya has quitted its nuclear program. Perhaps the most disturbing lesson to emerge from our work in Iran and
Libya is the existence of an extensive illicit market for the supply of nuclear items, which clearly thrived on
demand. The relative ease with which a multinational illicit network could be set up and operated demonstrates
clearly the inadequacy of the present export control system
Iraq, as an NPT party, was obliged to declare all facilities but did not do so. Nor, more recently, did Iran. In
North Korea, the activities concerned took place before the conclusion of its NPT safeguards agreement, using a
Russian "research" reactor and clandestine reprocessing plant. Examples of Iran, North Korea and Iraq, illustrate
both the strengths and weaknesses of international safeguards. While accepting safeguards at declared facilities,
Iraq and Iran had set up elaborate equipment elsewhere in an attempt to enrich uranium, in Iraq's case, to
weapons grade.
North Korea used research reactors (not commercial electricity-generating reactors) and a reprocessing plant to
produce some weapons-grade plutonium. It’s begun in the mid-1980s. The Democratic People´s Republic of
Korea (DPRK) needed seven years to fulfill its obligations under the NPT to conclude a safeguards agreement
with the Agency. In 1992 this agreement was concluded and the IAEA began inspections. Shortly after the
beginning of inspections IAEA’s stated, that the DPRK had not reported its total production of plutonium In the
case of the DPRK, however, the undeclared activities had occurred before NPT safeguards inspections had
commenced. As part of the verification of the “initial inventory” of nuclear material declared by the DPRK, the
IAEA analyzed declared plutonium and found anomalies indicating that the DPRK had separated plutonium at
times other than those declared - and therefore that the DPRK had plutonium additional to that declared. The
DPRK refused to allow further inspections to investigate this situation. From that time forward, the DPRK has
been in continuous non-compliance with its NPT obligations, and has not allowed the IAEA to fully verify its
nuclear program. At the end of 2002, the DPRK capped that non-compliance by ordering IAEA inspectors out
of the country, dismantling the monitoring cameras, breaking IAEA seals and, a few weeks later, declaring its
withdrawal from the NPT. Finally DPRK was able to perform already two nuclear detonations.
Pros/Cons & Way Ahead
Successful in:
1.
2.
3.
Minimizing proliferation risks for dealing with Plutonium from peaceful facilities.
Dealing with Plutonium in domestic and national cases / issues.
Establishing strong legal agreements with Western world societies.
Not effective to the following areas:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Plutonium safeguards for non-state actors (lack of information exchange).
Transnational transportation through non-state actors.
Wasting streams coming out of facilities. (Diversion risks high).
Tracing materials from countries that have not signed strong legal agreements.
International integration among all state actors.
Interoperability among global partnerships (too time consuming).
Early detection of early misuse of materials.
Dynamic changes into the fast altering global security environment.
Information exchange on countries that have signed voluntary agreements.
Physical access to problematic locations… rely on national policy and UN powerless.
9.
10.
Way Ahead - Proposals
1.
Containment and surveillance needs enhancement in process (create analytic list of all active
stakeholders and not only those that have signed)
2.
Create common protocols and agreements in order to make processes to be followed effectively and
meticulously.
3.
Comprehensive bilateral agreements to strengthen links and provide desirable level of safety.
4.
Create financial, political, technological tools to enforce agreements (only very few today exist).
5.
Educate IAEA authorities in all countries in order not to be uneven.
6.
Unprecedented expansion in energy demand have caused safeguards to be obsolete. Create mechanisms
that will allow to keep up with the global dynamic environment.
Conclusion
For all this, IAEA shows its limits to protect humanity against the nuclear risk. The international community
gets the lessons and began to work in other way like sanctions against states and creating good initiatives like
the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (GICNT).
Are we Safer today? Of course not. Lot of things had to be done to develop first a common understanding of
the threat with the international and regional cooperation including agencies.
All the resources had to be deployed to build a real network to deal with the threat to:
-
building capacity for detection, forenscs and response for contries,
organized exercises and workshop,
share good practice
build step by step a international legal framework