Comparison of tagging technologies for safeguards of copper canisters for nuclear spent fuel

Abstract

Several countries are planning to store nuclear spent fuel in long term geological repositories, preserved by copper canisters with an iron insert. This new approach involves many challenging problems and one is to satisfy safeguards requirements: the Continuity of Knowledge (CoK) of the fuel must be kept from the encapsulation plant up to the final repository. To date, no measurement system has been suggested for a unique identification and authentication. Following the list of the most important safeguards, safety and security requirements for copper canisters identification and authentication, a review of conventional tagging technologies and measurement systems for nuclear items is reported in this paper. The aim of this study is to verify to what extent each technology could be potentially used for keeping the CoK of copper canisters. Several tagging methods are briefly described and compared, discussing advantages and disadvantages.