Title: Proliferation Resistance and Safeguards Issues with Proposed Pebble Bed and TRISO Fueled Reactors and Their Fuel Cycles
Author: Brian Boyer – Idaho National Laboratory
Abstract: IAEA Safeguards need to evaluate the development and deployment of a State’s reactors holistically in light of a State Level Approach that examines the crucial infrastructure of the fuel cycle front-end and back-end as proliferation and acquisition paths. This task calls for renewed efforts using updated and effective proliferation resistance and safeguards tools. Proliferation resistance concepts of the International Project on Innovative Nuclear Reactors and Fuel Cycles (INPRO) and the Proliferation Resistance and Physical Protection Working Group (PR&PPWG) include material attractiveness as a key concept as well as evaluating the technologies and legal and administrative backbones of a State’s
nonproliferation efforts. These concepts are extremely important tools in evaluating the sensitive proliferation paths that using HALEU creates during the enrichment and fuel fabrication processes for TRISO fuel and deployment in Pebble Bed Reactors (PBRs). Concerns about HALEU need to be addressed at this stage of the development in keeping with Safety, Security, and Safeguards (3S) and Safety, Security, and Safeguards by Design (3SBD) programs being promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Several studies previously examined the safeguards and proliferation resistance issues with PBR and TRISO fuels as deployment of these concepts seemed imminent around 2010. While these fuel cycle concepts were fairly dormant during the 2010’s except for China, which is a Nuclear Weapons State, in 2025 new concepts using TRISO in pebble bed reactors were progressing fast with pilot TRISO fuel fabrication and pebble bed test reactors under construction and TRISO fuels in laboratory test phases that could lead to deployments in the U.S. as well as Non-Nuclear Weapons States. These new developments in TRISO HALEU fuels and the KAIROS as well as the X-Energy pebble bed concepts show that a new urgency in the evaluation of these technologies and their proposed implementation strategies must include further R&D on safeguards technology and concepts throughout the fuel cycle. These efforts should incubate ideas for robust safeguards and 3SBD for the entire fuel cycle for TRISO and pebble bed reactors to provide effective safety, security, and safeguards in time for deployment of these concepts on a global scale. This presentation describes using proliferation resistance and material attractiveness analysis as well using the IAEA Physical Model to chart TRISO fuel and PBRs in a womb-to-tomb fuel cycle study of these technologies.