IAEA safeguards at gas centrifuge enrichment plants (GCEPs) need improvement to verify declared LEU production, detect undeclared LEU production and detect HEU production. Due to increases in facility size and volume of throughput, the current safeguards regime for large capacity GCEPs must be enhanced to meet detection probability targets. Current safeguards efforts employ attended systems operated by inspectors on-site to determine uranium enrichment levels and total uranium mass of UF6 cylinders to verify operator declarations. Verification of enrichment levels and uranium mass could be improved by a combination of process monitoring and unattended advanced safeguards systems currently under development at several U.S. national laboratories. The effectiveness of these efforts could be augmented by implementing information-driven inspections and relaxing probability of detection standards given a broader state-level conclusion of an absence of proliferation activities. The hardware costs of these options for new GCEPs safeguards were analyzed for different detection probabilities. The savings of an advanced safeguards system were quantified and the benefits for operators and the Inspectorate were discussed.
