well as the bodies to implement state accounting for and control of nuclear material.
By and large, accounting and control of nuclear material is an essential part of state NM administration and, therefore, the compositions of state NM administration and control systems have much in common.
Rosatom is the major state corporation carrying out administration of nuclear material in Russian nuclear energy. Rosatom has also been assigned to the task to develop and maintain state system of accounting for and control of nuclear material.
Within the limits of its authority, Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation:
∙Effectuates state policy in state accounting for and control of nuclear material;
∙Implements state accounting for and control of nuclear material in the Russian Federation, notwithstanding the form of ownership for this;
∙Implements procedural guidance for and coordinates the activities by federal executive power bodies implementing control with respect to atomic energy uses in state accounting for and control of nuclear material;
∙Operates the state register of federally owned nuclear material;
∙Keeps the listing of nuclear material in possession of Russian legal entities, as well as of that owned by foreign states and foreign legal entities and held for the time being in the Russian Federation;
∙Keeps registers of material balance areas and areas to report on;
∙Supplies, on requests from Russian government agencies, state atomic energy administration authorities and state atomic energy regulation bodies, such information on inventories and transfers of nuclear material as they may require to discharge their functions;
∙Supports the design, development and operation of the federal computerized information system for accounting and control of nuclear material and establishes information and analytical organizations and/or information acquisition and processing centers;
∙Develops and approves forms of reports in state accounting for and control of nuclear material, as well as the manner and frequency in which these shall be submitted;
∙Develops and approves the form of the state register for federally owned nuclear material and the form of the listing for nuclear material in possession of Russian legal entities, as well as for that owned by foreign
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states and foreign legal entities and held for the time being in the Russian Federation;
∙Develops federal standards and regulations for carrying out state accounting for and control of nuclear material;
∙Establishes nuclear material accounting and control training and retraining centers in such manner as specified by Russian law, and supports operation of these;
∙Implements control with respect to the status and operation of state system of accounting for and control of nuclear material in Russian Federation, notwithstanding the form of ownership for this;
∙Implements control of nuclear material handling;
∙Supports, jointly with the Federal Agency for Technical Regulations and Metrology, certifications and qualifications of nuclear material characterization equipment and techniques.
Regulatory framework. In the body of the tasks the state agencies authorized to control the use of atomic energy have been assigned to by the Government, emphasis is placed on the development of regulations and rules for state accounting and control of nuclear material. Most of these documents have been developed and put into effect to date. The underlying document is the General Rules for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (NP–30–05 [1]). This was discussed in bri ef in Part I, Chapter 5.
Composition of information flows. As required by the Federal Rules for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (NP–030–05), a consolidated system of reports is established for different levels of state accounting and control of NM. Within this system, information flows are formed as described below. The material balance area (MBA) level involves all measurements, booking of all NM receipts, shipments and measurement results, and closing of nuclear material balances. Each MBA accumulates therefore primary and the most accurate information on all NM inventories, as proved by the balance closing. All this information makes an elementary autonomous subsystem of the federal NM accounting and control information system. This information is subsequently reviewed, handled and submitted in a consolidated form.
The operator level does not already require all measurement data and all balance area input. Still, there is a need for some consolidated data. Thus, one needs to be aware of all fresh fuel receipts and irradiated fuel shipments, as well as of the fresh and irradiated fuel quantities in storage, to account for the NM at an NPP. So, accordingly, only such data is sent from the MBA.
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Further on, all this data, in a still more concise form, is concentrated at the federal level, i.e. within Rosatom. Details on how the material is distributed among the material balance areas are unlikely to be needed by government leaders. However, if all details on NM are required, this may be requested for directly from the respective MBA.
1.2. Operator-level accounting of NM
Each agency has operators, that is, integrated mills, nuclear centers or concerns that are immediately in charge of nuclear plant operations. These fabricate, process and use nuclear material. So, “M ayak”, an integrated mill in the Urals, includes a plant for chemical processing of spent nuclear fuels (RT–1). There is also a facility for storage of the plutonium extracted from WWER-440 reactor fuel at RT-1. It is also used to store plutonium extracted at RT-1 from spent fuel assemblies of nuclear power plants. These are complex and rather large installations.
Rosatom also has major research centers. One of these is State Research Center “Institute of Physics and Power Engineering” in Obninsk, a large nuclear research establishment that operates a number of large-size facilities, including the world’s first nuclear power plant, the BOR–10 reactor and BFS–1,2 critical assemblies.
Another major research center is National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”, Russia’s oldest and largest nuclear cen ter. The center’s R&D works have been a great contribution to the development of Soviet and, subsequently, Russian nuclear industry. Over its history since the formation time back in the 1940s, the center has had large nuclear material inventories of all grades, forms and enrichments accumulated therein. The Kurchatov Institute has over 30 nuclear facilities, including nuclear reactors, critical and subcritical assemblies, and so on.
An operator of Rosatom is FGUP “Atomflot”. This has in control all of the civilian icebreaker fleet formed to guide cargo ships through Arctic ice. Now, the active fleet consists of four nuclear-propelled icebreakers with a two-reactor nuclear power plant of 75,000 hp. These are the Rossiya,
Sovetskiy Soyuz, Yamal and 50 let Pobedy nuclear-powered ships; two icebreakers, Taymyr and Vaygach, with a single-reactor plant of 40,000 hp; and Sevmorput, a nuclear-propelled container ship with a reactor facility of the same power. There are also four nuclear fleet maintenance and repair ships, including two repair ships, Imandra and Lotta, the Serebryanka LRW tanker and the Rosta-1 radiation monitoring ship. Three nuclear
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icebreakers, Lenin, Arktika and Sibir, and two repair ships, Lepse and Volodarskiy, have been decommissioned and are non-operational.
Another operator of Rosatom is OAO “Rosenergoatom C oncern”. This controls all Russian NPPs, including Balakovo, Beloyarskaya, Kola, Kalinin, Smolensk, Novo-Voronezhskaya and other nuclear power plants with a large number of power units.
Until recently, the NM accounting and control system had its operations limited to the facility level. All NM data was sent from facilities. However, as the new material balance accounting system requires, also material balance areas are introduced where all necessary NM data is generated by measurements.
Enterprise NM accounting: organizational, scientific and technical arrangements
There are many organizations in Russia using nuclear material in different forms, including nuclear power plants, integrated mills, research centers and others. It is exactly these organizations that bear most of the burden in the development of accounting systems. While general state NM accounting and control systems have been mostly prepared and commissioned by now, a great deal of exertion is needed to have practical NM accounting and control systems developed for enterprises. By and large, things with NM should be shaped so that to meet the requirements of the present day and the respective regulations and rules. In the context of NM, this requires the following:
∙organizational efforts (including the appointment of administrative staff to be responsible for keeping records of nuclear material);
∙NM accounting procedures should be developed in accordance with the site specifics;
∙the site should be further equipped with the advanced technology to implement top-level accounting. This primarily suggests that computer systems for NM accountancy and instrumentation for NM measurements should be introduced;
∙finally, personnel should be trained in the new rules, based on which the accounting system is built, and the equipment handling rules.
Major components of enterprise NM accounting systems
The NM accounting system of a nuclear enterprise shall include three major components:
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∙the NM accounting system proper (information system);
∙NM measurements and control of measurements;
∙physical inventory takings.
As noted above, the accounting system ensures the knowledge about NM (state, location and movements), this knowledge to be complete, confident and timely. These characteristics of our knowledge of NM are achieved, inter alia, using the above NM accounting means. Thus, confidence is achieved through measurements of NM and control of the measurement quality. The completeness of knowledge is achieved by physical inventory takings for all existing NM. Timeliness is achieved with the aid of a computerized information system.
1.3. Evolution of nuclear material accounting systems
NM bookkeeping system
Nuclear material accounting systems have quite a long history of evolution. Early systems were based on the so-called bookkeeping. This is a universally employed approach to accounting of tangibles. In the context of NM, bookkeeping has many things specific to it.
1.Nuclear material was measured when the process required so. When this was not required by the process, only paper records were kept. If a material had not been changed technologically or was not involved in the process and was simply moved, this NM was accounted for solely based on the documents that were enclosed and handed over therewith.
2.This is a deterministic accounting system. No NM measurement errors were included in the NM certificate data so the confidence of this NM data was unknown. New measurements often led to discrepancies between the existing and newly obtained data. The NM data nonconformity was eliminated using the concept of the technological loss standard. That is, processing and handling of NM was regarded to involve some discard of it. This discard was determined in a directive manner based on the experience of operators in the nuclear industry.
The 50-year history of operations with NM has led to a great deal of discrepancy between the documentation on NM and the reality.
NM measured material balance system
There is another NM accounting system that has none of the above deficiencies and has been receiving, recently, an increasingly growing recognition. This is the system of the so-called measured material balance
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