The Concept of Goals-Driven Safeguards

The IAEA, NRC, and DOE regulations and requirements for safeguarding nuclear material and facilities have been reviewed and each organization’s purpose, objectives, and scope are discussed in this report. Current safeguards approaches are re-examined considering technological advancements and how these developments are changing safeguards approaches used by these organizations. Additionally, the physical protection approaches required by the IAEA, NRC, and DOE were reviewed and the respective goals, objectives, and requirements are identified and summarized in this report. From these, a brief comparison is presented showing the high-level similarities among these regulatory organizations’ approaches to physical protection. The regulatory documents used in this paper have been assembled into a convenient reference library called the Nuclear Safeguards and Security Reference Library. The index of that library is included in this report, and DVDs containing the full library are available.