 What I'd like to talk about today is basically what constitutes nuclear material that's subject to safeguards. So that's clear in everyone's mind. We'll go over real quickly the nuclear fuel cycle and how it pertains to safeguards. We'll talk about safeguards, relevant information, some of it's not relevant to safeguards. Discuss what we call and refer to as acquisition path analysis, how we identify technically plausible paths for acquiring weapons usable nuclear material, and then how we develop a state level approach to cover those acquisition paths. And then we'll get into the activities, the types of activities that the agency conducts and how we evaluate the results of those activities and then how we draw conclusions. So basically, information's coming into the IEA, into the safeguards department, and conclusions come out. Hopefully sound credible conclusions. So first of all, not all material is subject to safeguards. Can anybody think of a nuclear material that is subject to safeguards? That's a common one you can think of, talked about this morning a bit. Okay, I think uranium. So naturally uranium, not right out of the ground, but once it reaches a certain stage in the nuclear fuel cycle where it's a suitable form in composition, it's subject to safeguards. So this obviously is naturally occurring. But if I take that and I put it through a process, let's say enrichment, I'd have to do something else too and we'll get into this, we'll have to convert it to something in order to enrich it. But essentially I can produce high enriched uranium and the tails from that are depleted uranium. Are these both nuclear materials? They are. And as you can see, one is what we call source material, the other is a special fissionable material, and we'll go into that in a second. I can also put this in a reactor, which we talked about this morning, a research reactor would be one possible source. And I can irradiate the natural uranium for the depleted uranium and convert the U238 isotope to plutonium. Primarily, PU-239 is the isotope of concern. And then there's also one other fuel cycle. Yeah, exactly. So the thorium cycle, not very common. India has a pretty advanced program, has for years. But as far as the civilian fuel cycle that's under safeguards, it's not widespread. And you can produce, similar to irradiating and separating, you can produce uranium 233. So I just want to highlight that the materials up here, what we call source material, that's fertile material. Can you make a bomb out of that? Not directly, so we refer to it as indirect use of nuclear material. You have to do something to it, add what we call strategic value, and turn it into special fissionable material. We'll go into that in detail. But down here, we have special fissionable material. You can make a bomb out of this directly, if you have the right amounts. So there's a term we call significant quantity. And this essentially is how much nuclear material you need in order to make a nuclear explosive device. Or it can't be ruled out. So I just want to highlight, these would be good numbers to know. You can see for the source material, we're talking tons of it. So natural uranium, we need 10 tons of natural uranium. The pleated uranium, 20 tons. So if anyone's familiar with UF6 cylinders, you basically need two large depleted uranium UF6 cylinders to get 20 tons. Thorium is also 20 tons. So lots of nuclear material would be required. Again, a ton of amounts. And then for the special fissionable material, the SQs are much lower. So as you can see for plutonium, it's only eight kilograms. So much lower amount, uranium 233 is the same. I have to clarify here, and we talked about it this morning, once uranium goes above 0.71, when you take it out of the ground, it's 0.71, you put it through an enrichment process, 0.72, 0.8, 0.91, Now we call it low enriched uranium. Usually for reactors, as you probably know, they stop at about 3% or 4%. For fuel for power reactors, for research reactors, they may go a little higher, maybe up to around 19%. Now there are some research reactors that still operate on high enriched uranium. And HEU is when you go above this 20%. It's just somewhat arbitrary, and it's spelled out in the statute to the IEA. So at 21%, can you make a bomb out of HEU? Probably not, at 30, 40, 50. Probably getting, if you have a sophisticated country and they have some know-how, maybe probably be a pretty large bomb, but 60, 70, 80, when you get those percent of U-235 isotopes, especially in the 90, 92, 93% range, it's getting much smaller, and you can see the significant quantity drops down drastically down to about 25 kgs. Not that much material really. So from a safeguard standpoint, these are the numbers we're concerned about. We sample and we verify against these numbers. Now just to highlight, it's not just about the nuclear material. There's also processes. So we safeguard the nuclear material. We also safeguard the facilities where these nuclear materials are located. So as I mentioned for uranium, if you can enrich it, you can make high enriched uranium. So enrichment is a very sensitive stage of the nuclear field cycle. Likewise for uranium and thorium, you can use an irradiation path, put it in a reactor, and then you need to separate it because it still has fission products, actinides, other things you have to remove from it in order to have plutonium and uranium 233. And I should highlight that, ultimately you need these in a metallic form. And just as a reminder, those are the significant quantities. And just keep that, maybe if you're a test, keep this number here for plutonium, eight kilograms in mind. So real quick, let's go over the nuclear field cycle. I think you had this earlier in the week, but uranium comes out of the ground, could also come from other sources, could come from phosphates, could be a byproduct of gold mining, copper mining. There's some research into extracting uranium from seawater, not very viable commercially, but it's theoretically possible and practically possible. So it's been done. Once it comes out of the mine, usually it goes to a milling and a concentration plant. It's still not under safeguards. Let's say, assume this is uranium here, still wouldn't be under safeguards here. But once it goes to the next step, conversion, user has to undergo some kind of chemical conversion process for the nuclear fuel cycle. So let's say, U02 in order to be used for fuel, could also be uranium metal, and it could be some exotic uranium carbide if it's going to research reactor fuel, or maybe a US-6 compound if it's going to be used in enrichment to be enriched, and then it'll be further converted to U02, typically for fuel. But at this point, this is generally where safeguards will start. And when I talk about safeguards, I mean detailed nuclear accounts where the state is obligated to report information and agency inspectors will verify that information. After conversion, it could go directly into fuel. This is a little bit misleading. This wouldn't be an LWR type assembly, but if it's not enriched, it's just natural uranium base that could be converted into, let's say, an on-load reactor bundle for a candy type cycle, or magnax would also work. But if they want to use an LWR type reactor, they'd have to first enrich it. So they'd have to go through an enrichment process, some sort of enrichment services, and then they could bring it back, make fuel out of it, and fabricate fuel. Eventually, though, this would go in a reactor. And this reactor, as I mentioned, like the enrichment plant, is a sensitive part of the nuclear fuel cycle because what does this reactor do when it makes electricity? Or a medical isotope if it's a research reactor. It converted that uranium, U238, into plutonium. So this added strategic value from a safeguards standpoint. We're still concerned with fuel fabrication, with the LEU fuel, but putting it through the reactor created plutonium inside that assembly. So it's more sensitive from a safeguards standpoint. The good news is, it's heavily irradiated. So it's got fission products that act nice with it, so it's not easy to get to. So in that sense, we call it self-protecting, and usually it has to go into a pond. It'll cool for a few years, depending on the burn-up and radiation history. Typically, it's for power plants in there for three cycles, so three years about. And then it goes into wet storage. It's cooled in a spent fuel pond for three, four, five years, sometimes longer. Usually it's determined by capacity. Once they fill up the pool, they've got to do something up because they can't discharge any more fuel into the pond. It's that capacity. So it's usually transferred to a dry storage and large casks. So you still need this heavy shieldings. Even after it's cooled, 10 or 15 or 20 years, it's still highly radioactive. And that's a benefit from a safeguards perspective. The other option is a country could go a reprocessing route. Not many countries do this. Some of the advanced nuclear fuel cycles, states like France and Russia do this. India does it. Japan has it, it's sort of in standby right now. But if you send it to a reprocessing facility, and again for civilian purposes, they're trying to separate out those fission products and those actinides, you have the uranium and the plutonium, which is still useful. Most of the uranium isn't even consumed. So it's sort of a waste if it stays in the fuel. If you extract it, it becomes an asset again. But it also took away those fission products. So this material went from being what we call irradiated direct-use material to unirradiated direct-use materials. Very attractive from a safeguards perspective. And sometimes a country might do this. Japan does it for mixed oxide fuels. So they'll mix the uranium they recover or they could mix a depleted uranium, mix the plutonium and they'll make a max fuel. The other option in a couple of countries looking into this is a long-term repository. So Finland, I don't know if it'll come online but maybe in the next decade or so, they're looking at a repository. They've been doing it for a while on testing. Sweden also has an underground facility that they're testing. So maybe ultimately they'll put their spent fuel into a repository. That's sort of an advantage from a safeguard perspective because it's below ground, very far down. As long as the repositories, they're retrievable. But you'd still probably need some safeguard measures on that repository once it's operational. And just to highlight, to have a fuel cycle like this, and this is pretty extensive, this would reflect something like Germany 15, 20 years ago. Germany's a bit in decline now. Japan, maybe South Korea. You need some R&D associated with that. And you can have research and development without nuclear material. You can also, you'll need some kind of manufacturing base. So if you're gonna have your own reactors or export reactors, you've got to know how to make control ride drive mechanisms or active cooling pumps. This is important from a safeguard standpoint because it tells a lot about the capability of the state, and I'll get into that in detail later. And the other thing, and this is a little bit worrisome from a safeguard standpoint, is you can have R&D without nuclear material. They don't have, a state is not obligated to tell us if they're doing research with centrifuges, with hot cells, as long as they don't introduce nuclear material. A minute a gram of nuclear material enters the picture, and it's a facility with nuclear material in it, and they have to report that. But if there's no nuclear material in the facility, they could test, let's say if they're testing with centrifuges, a small pilot plant, they could use a surrogate gas instead of UF-6. And most states will have what we call location outside facility. This tends to be like a small, like a hospital or a university where they might have reagents or a lot of times it's depleted uranium or natural energy for shielding of radioisotopes, things like that. It might be a plutonium source, but in gram levels, and they're allowed to have that, and usually it's in, we don't call it a facility, we call it location outside of a facility. We refer to it as lofts. So this is a pretty, I have to admit, this is a pretty extensive nuclear fuel cycle. But just to show you, what's under safeguards? What they're, again, obligated to report, and we have the right to verify under a comprehensive safeguards agreement. And I think you'll hear more about this tomorrow. Usually the legal aspects is covered before this, so there's something called a INCIRC-153. INCIRC's just a bureaucratic name for a document, IEA, but there's a 150, 151, 152, 153 was the next number, and that referred to comprehensive safeguards agreements. And the lawyer from safeguards will talk about this in detail tomorrow. But under a comprehensive safeguards agreement, this is what is under safeguards. I mentioned that the starting point is here, depending on the purity and how much purification equipment they have at the concentration plant it might start earlier. But generally, you can see that manufacturing is outside. I mentioned about the R&B without the material. It involves no material, it's gotta be in a facility or a law office, it's gotta be in a safeguards. But as you can see, the comprehensive safeguards agreement, which was part of the MPT, which came out in the mid-70s, or I'm sorry, the early 70s, the MPT, and then these CSA agreements started coming out in the mid-70s, wasn't so comprehensive because it didn't cover everything. And this was found to be a weakness in the early 90s, actually late 80s, early 90s with the sort of case studies like Iraq and later with Bolivia and other countries. So, after that in the mid-90s, the agency came up with what they referred to as the additional protocol. And the number for this was INCIRC 540. And under 540, it basically gave the agency increased information and increased access. So, the main features are we got access to mining, not in a detailed new control counts away, but in general production levels at the mine. So we have information about the state's mining capability. Before they didn't have to tell us about mining, now they'd have to tell us that they're actively producing uranium. Mention the nuclear fuel cycle, R&D not involving nuclear material, they have to declare that and tell us about it. And also if they're manufacturing sensitive equipment. So if they're manufacturing hot cells or rotors for gas centrifuges, that has to be, that the agency has to be notified of that through what we call additional protocol declarations, even if there's no nuclear material involved. And there's other things like 10 year plans that they have to tell us their, basically their forecast of where their fuel cycle is going in the next 10 years. It also gave us increased access. So we have short notice, depends on the type of what we call complementary access. So it's not technically an inspection, but it helps the agency go to places that other than facilities, because we have access to facilities, that's where we normally verify new material. And now we're checking, there might be undeclared locations or information that possibly there's undeclared nuclear material or activities, or at least there's an inconsistency when we're trying to resolve it. So you might go to that site and the complementary access allows us to go there legally. There's no facility, inspections over facilities, complementary access is for locations that where there are no facilities. And again, I mentioned the short notice. It also gave us some administrative measures because usually when we go to a state as an inspector, you have to get a visa from the state. Well, if you have to get a visa, you're tipping the state off, that you're gonna be going to the state. So under the additional protocol, states are required to issue multiple entry visas. So usually it's good for a year. So you don't have to keep requesting a visa to go to the state. So that also streamlines the whole administrative process. It makes the complementary access more effective. So under, so that was the original comprehensive safeguards agreement under 153, under 540, what we call the additional protocol that increased information, increased access. You can see it's more all-encompassing of the entire nuclear field cycle. This is important, I'll get into this later, because now we have a more comprehensive understanding of the nuclear field cycle, the capabilities the state has, and the potential those capabilities can offer the state in terms of if they decided to proliferate. So I wanna go over, introduce a quick nuclear field cycle. This is a fairly common one. Yes, yes. So when you think about the mining, it's the amount of the order of the state's media or from the nuclear weapons and the defense of us? Yeah, what they're obligated to report is the production of uranium in ton quantities. So they don't have to say how much ore they produce, but how much uranium was produced from that mine. Or it could be if it's a copper mine and they're concentrating uranium as a byproduct, they have to tell us about that uranium production. Basically, it's not just a mine, it's any source, any extraction or production source of uranium. So it could be from phosphates, it could be from seawater, but the most common ones now are mining or byproducts of mine. So here's an example of nuclear fuel cycle. Let's say, just for illustration, this state imports its fresh fuel. Part of it is LWR-type fuel. It goes to their power plants to make electricity. The other part is, let's say, MTR-type fuel plates and it goes to a research reactor that has hot cells. You heard about that this earlier today. And we'll say they're making medical isotopes. I think it looks like molybdenum-99 technician type operation. They'll be able to do some training too. It's, once it's spent, it's been in the reactor for a few years or it's discharged from the research reactor. It goes to some sort of cooling, not as long or not as intense in a research reactor, but for power plants, they'd have to cool it. And eventually, as I mentioned, they'll transfer it to dry storage. And let's say the state has some research without nuclear material, R&D related to fuel cycle without nuclear material, and they have a lot. This is a pretty typical, I could think of a lot of states with this sized nuclear fuel cycle. It's a medium sized nuclear fuel cycle. So again, we want to understand the capability so we can assess those capabilities in terms of any proliferation risk. And I'll get into this as acquisition path analysis. So we'd highlight that from our understanding of the state that power plants, their research reactor technology are all imported. That's kind of important because they've imported this, know how their technology user, not a holder, so they're receiving this technology, not supplying it, that tells me something about their capabilities to replicate it if they wanted to. They have hot cells capable of processing spent fuel. Well, that tells me these hot cells gotta be pretty large if they're gonna take an LWR fuel assembly, but they could. I've seen some that are pretty long. Usually it's for pins, post-radiation examination to test the pins. But they could have that. So, but we have to keep that in mind that they have large hot cells. And they have some lofts, which is typical. And they have some R&D involving nuclear material relevant to the conversion of plutonium for metal form. Sounds a little suspicious. Now, is the state allowed to do this? They can. They just have to declare it. So the state has declared it and we understand it. The group at the agency that would look into this, we call it a state evaluation group. The country officer might be a little bit concerned about that, but it's okay the state doesn't. They declare it. You might wanna follow through on it just to learn the extent what's going on with this R&D down here. It doesn't seem coherent with the nuclear fuel cycle, but I don't know, maybe in their 10-year plan they have a future. Someone mentioned earlier, I think fast breeder reactors or maybe they have some research reactor on the horizon that may use a PU-type fuel. So it could be associated with that. Peaceful use is perfectly fine. Yeah, I'll get to that. So right now this is just a peaceful fuel cycle that has to be safeguarded. All this is allowed. Is that what you're asking what the safeguard aspects are? Okay, I'll get into that and the measures we take. Just using this example so you can see a typical fuel cycle. Then we'll assume, this is very important, we have to know our legal basis. So we'll assume we have a comprehensive safeguards agreement and additional protocol and force. You'll learn more about these tomorrow. So full information, full access about this state. So I just wanna back up a little bit. So we have four basic core processes at the IAEA and the safeguards department. First we have what we call collecting and evaluating information. We call this state evaluation. We're always constant looking at information that's coming in and doing what we call consistency analysis to make sure everything's adding up. There's something we expect. And now we observe something and we make sure it makes sense. After that, once we have this solid understanding of the state, we get into what we call action path analysis. So we develop state level approaches. This is where we identify the measures to cover the fuel cycle. And then we actually conduct activities in the field. Inspectors will go in the field. Analysts at headquarters will assimilate and synthesize information and analyze information. And we'll look at the results of that. And finally we'll draw conclusions based on that. And there could be issues that arise or inconsistencies. We have to resolve those. So there's always a little bit of a feedback. We call this, if it's minor, it's generally inconsistency. If it gets a little more serious, we refer to it as a safeguards anomaly. It has to be resolved. Otherwise it could impair the conclusion for the state. Final safeguards conclude. So let's focus on this top part where we collect and evaluate information. Again, it's to get a firm understanding of the state so we can do rock solid consistency analysis. So we consolidate all relevant information. We'll get into the various sources. This helps to form the basis so we can do an informed action path analysis because we have to make technical judgments in that analysis. It establishes a profile or a picture of the states in the fuel cycle. So there's the state and there's the IEA. IEA is always blue, I'm not sure why. So there's information that comes in from the state that they're obligated to provide a supply to the agency. I'll go into the various reports they have to submit. But I just want to highlight, is this information the truth? Is it the whole truth? Well, I hope so. I hope the state is honest and they're declaring all their activities and all their new material. But if they have a clandestine program, they're probably not going to tell us about it. So just have to take with a grain of salt that thank you the state that provided lots of information, but we also have to check that information. So the IEA conducts its own activities, take measurements for your containment, surveillance, I'll go into all these in detail. And that information comes back, we check it against what the state has told us. So the example state that I gave you, the imported fresh fuel, let's say they import 40 assemblies for their power plant to refuel unit one, let's say. The state that exported those told the agency we sent 40 assemblies. The state they received it is obligated to tell us they received for it. We would know 40 new assemblies are in this country. So next time we go to an inspection facility, we know there should be 40 new fresh fuel assemblies and we can verify those. So we're always corroborating and comparing this information that we received. Hopefully, this is the truth. Our instruments are calibrated. The inspectors are trained well in order to compare it to this information. And there's another source. I'll just refer to this as sort of other, the public domain, as information that's in open sources could be in trade journals, newspapers. Yeah. And I'll get into it, but what I mean here is this is things like physical inventory listings, inventory change reports, detailed detail account reports for the new material in their state at their facilities. It's also these additional protocol declarations. So if they're doing mining to report related to their mining production articles that they prepare related to their mining production. So that's safeguards information provided by the state. Yeah, it's just safe. And this whole thing is on safeguards well in relevant information. If they tell us things like, well, we're gonna improve the health physics department, one of the facilities. It's interesting information. Okay, they're, it's needed. It's important to have trained health physics staff, but may not be entirely safeguards relevant. So may it be less of a concern for us. We're just aware of it. No, you read about it, but it may not influence anything. So I'm talking mainly about safeguards relevant information that might impact the conclusions for the state. So I think, yeah. Yeah, the state, yeah. State's responsible. Ultimately the state is responsible. I think you mean like the operator is operating a plant. Some places, some states have more authority or autonomy than other places, but in the end, in their legal agreement will require this, the state is responsible for the new material on their territory and their jurisdiction under their control. I forget the exact legal wording, but they're still responsible. Some states have a stronger national inspectorate or national program, national authority. We refer to it as an SSAC, state system for accounting and control. Some are stronger than others. Actually, some may not have one. That's to be a point of contact, but the fuel cycle may be very small. But if they have a reactor and they have facilities, they have to have a governing body that regulates that for the things we heard about today, security safety and for safeguards. Is that what you meant through? Well, the new material, they're obligated to tell the agency about it down to gram levels for plutonium, for natural uranium and depleted uranium, it's kilogram levels. They have to tell us about it and they have to tell us where it is and the purpose and it's in a facility, it's in what we call a material balance area. So we're gonna account for it. Some of it bureaucratic administratively, but we have to have that in order to, because nuclear material may come in and out of that material balance area, that facility. We always have to be able to, at any moment, know how much the materials are in that facility. So this information is, again, synthesized, sifted through by analysts. Again, the state evaluation group would look at it. It's put into what we call very secure servers, digested, so there's a firm understanding of the state. So let's go over some examples of declared information by the state. I mentioned some of these already. From a nuclear material accountancy standpoint, we have physical inventory listings. This is a list of how much materials in the facility, usually by item and weight. And they change that inventory. They have to submit an inventory change report, typically at the end of the month, of when the inventory change occurred. So I know how much is going up. Could also be going down if they ship material out of their facility. Could be traveling through the nuclear fuel cycle in the country, and we're just keeping an eye on it where it is in the facility, or it could be going out of the country. But again, at any one time, we should know how much nuclear materials in the country, or in a facility. And a material balance report, which is sort of an end of year. There's this material balance evaluation that's done, but we need a material balance report, which tells us the initial inventory, and it increases, then it decreases, and then a verification inventory is done to confirm the closing, and close out the material balance evaluation. And that's a report to submit an associated one. They also get design information. So it's not just about the material, it's also how the facility's designed. It's not detailed design information, but it's safeguards, relevant information, the rating of the research reactor. I think this morning someone mentioned, I'm not sure, I guess Jordan is building a research reactor. Now, from a safeguards standpoint, if it's 1,000 kilowatts, okay, they could, from a safeguards perspective, I tend to stay up nights thinking about things, I'm probably a little bit suspicious, but anyone that has a research reactor, any country, I would say, well, if they got 1,000 kilowatt reactor, probably can't do too much with it in terms of misusing that reactor to produce plutonium. Maybe in an R&D lot, but that would be it. If it's five megawatts, 10 megawatts, now they're starting to produce some plutonium, I wouldn't call it appreciable quantities in a short time, but over several years, they could produce SQs. And if it gets up to 25, 30, or 40, 50 megawatt type reactors, now they can produce enough plutonium in half a year a year for weapons usable in the future. So then in safeguards, you might be more alerted to that reactor, and that might get more attention from a design review standpoint. So we get this design information from the state. We also get these additional protocols I was referring to, increased information on various parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. These are basically gaps that we're missing originally in this original 153 agreement. So just to show some examples, you see the red blinking parts, those are facilities. So the state is obligated to tell us and give us design information about those facilities. The earlier we get it, the better. Someone mentioned safeguards by design. Ideally, in the agencies trying to push this, we're trying to make the architects and engineers and designers of nuclear power plants familiar with safeguards, so they can do what we call design safeguards in early on. I mean, later on we can always come when they're constructed and commissioning the facility and we can put cameras and apply seals and things like that, but it's kind of late in the game to do anything innovative. So it'll probably just get a traditional suite of safeguards measures. We get material balance reports, physical and material listings that I talked about, ICRs, notifications of imports and exports. We have a good hand on the nuclear material. An additional protocol side of it, we get things like the description of R&D, not involving nuclear material, tenure plans, things like that. Now, these are some examples of information from safeguards activities. So these are things that the agency does, the specters or analysts. So we would go verify nuclear material and we'd have results from that nuclear material accountancy, we call it book off. But we'd also kick the tires, we'd also take measurements with instruments to determine the uranium content or the plutonium content of a certain material. Actually, if it's more for bulk handling facilities where there's powders and things like that, pellets, we can take destructive analysis samples. In terms of continuity of knowledge, if we verify some of the material, we can put a camera on it, let's see over a core over a spent field pond or we can apply seals that's on a reactor core. So we don't have to come back and verify the entire core, we can just verify the seal. The seal is okay. We can say, okay, that's the same content that's in that core. Not the seal is tampered with or broken and we'd have to get it that's an issue, probably an anomaly, we'd have to resolve. And again, that design information that's submitted by the state, we do what we call design information verification. They're technically, legally they're not inspections, they're visits for design information purposes, but we go and basically confirm that the facility is operated, it is built as designed and operated as designed. And also we could do things like environmental sampling. Typically this is done along with the complimentary accesses. So basically three types of access, inspections, design information verification, PIDs and complimentary access. As a fourth one technical visit, it usually has to do with testing, installing, or quit. But generally those are the four types of legal access that the inspectors will have to state on. I should mention, there's one more, it's hardly ever used, it's called a special inspection, 153, but it requires very serious conditions to warrant and improve the Board of Governors and things like that. So some examples of, oh, sorry, go ahead. Could be my initial thinking when I was inspecting was I trust my instruments. And I should have a rough idea. If I'm measuring, let's say a, the fuel rod scanner or something, I'm measuring a fuel rod, and it's declared that it has 4.2% as the enrichment level of the LED pellets inside the fuel rod. And I get 4.21111 or something, I might be satisfied. We actually have a threshold, statistical windows it has to be with, then so many relative standard deviations of the bar as these. But if it's wildly outside that, it could be an outlier. Now if it turns out to be 0.71, like natural, I would say this is a bit strange, and we would have to resolve that. It could be an instrument problem. Maybe it's calibrated to natural and the inspector didn't set it up properly or something. So they could back off, restart the instrument, check everything. Generally we have standards to check it against before we do the measurement. So that would hopefully correct that or make sure the instrument's working fine. But if it turns out it's natural and a remeasurement says natural, we'd probably check some other ones, check some other one, a few rods around that just to try and resolve it. It could be an instrument problem. It could be a training problem. It could also be it's not as declared. I've seen that sometimes they take a measurement of the, I'll say this is not correct, and then they'll realize ah, we gave you the wrong item. This is the item over here. So we go get the right item. Sometimes we're kind of, I call that QAing, the inventory of the operator to show you have to provide the right data, but things happen in the paper or a quarrel and things like that. So it could be an honest mistake. This is information from safeguard's activities. So things, we do our physical inventory verification at those sites that are blinking. Results of design information verification and results of complementary access. So again, we're getting information back. We're comparing that against information supplied by the state. And some examples of other information. Again, I talked about it could be just open source in the trade journal technical paper in the news. You gotta be careful here because sometimes there's a lot of bogus information out there. Sometimes an author, if they're not familiar with the nuclear field cycle, it's the terminology might be off. The article might be accurate, but it's not so precise. And there might be a nugget in there of truth, but you gotta go to the warden because the warden might be incorrect. I haven't got the terminology. Other satellite image, image is a lot of commercial satellite image providers now. Again, I talked about just news articles. Let's probably mention this briefly. Third party information is information that's provided by another state using regard to a third state. So they have a concern about another state that they've gained from their own information gathering processes, and they've informed the agency about that. Now we have to be careful here because that information has to be corroborated. We can't look the other way, but it might be something we need to follow up on. But we just can't assume the state is guilty. We have to corroborate that information and confirm it. And I should emphasize, this is a very small amount of information that comes in stages. Most of the information is declarations provided by the operator. There's a lot of new material accounts information that they've had to submit. Well, I should say this is growing as more people in the last, well probably in the last 10, 15 years, are publishing. There's a lot more people writing about nonproforations. There's a lot more articles out there than there was probably 20 years ago. Obviously digital technology, that's not publishing email, iPhones, everything else that happens. So you get a lot more of this, called big data. So we're talking about this part of the safeguard process, in terms of the wheel. This is basically established to an understanding, a detailed knowledge and understanding of the state's nuclear fuel cycle. And this will help us now to do what we call acquisition path analysis. Out of that, we'll identify the past that the state could use to acquire weapons as a one with material. You have to cover those paths and we establish what we call objectives or technical objectives to do that that we have to meet. We identify measures, I mentioned some of them, we'll go into more of those. And at this point in the wheel, we've developed what we call state level safeguards approach. This is essentially the game plan for how we're gonna safeguard the state. Still academic, still sort of a headquarters exercise. We're just thinking about how we're gonna do this and documenting a plan. So if we return to our fuel cycle again, to the example fuel cycle. So what is an acquisition path analysis? This is basically a structured analytical method, a technique or a tool to be used by the state evaluation group to assess how the state might acquire what we refer to as weapons useable material that can be used for a nuclear explosive device. I wanna highlight, it doesn't mean we assume the state is gonna do this. It's a hypothetical assumption for the purpose of analysis. We make this assumption for all states. So if the state decided to pursue a nuclear weapons program, how might they go about acquiring the weapons useable material to make that happen? So let's look at our example. If I ask you to look at this peaceful fuel cycle and you're doing acquisition path analysis and we usually tell the analysts to kind of switch their thinking a little bit and adopt what we call a red team outlook. Look at a little bit from the state, from a state that's again, hypothetically proliferating if they decided to do this. How would they go about it for this nuclear fuel cycle? Remember I mentioned earlier there's three types of nuclear, three types of nuclear bombs with the three types of materials. For those three materials, that'd be good for the test. High enriched uranium, plutonium, and then less obscure uranium 233, a little more obscure uranium 233. So if I looked at this fuel cycle, I didn't tell you anything about thorium. So they probably, they could irradiate, they'd have to have some knowledge about that in separation, but I wouldn't indicate any thorium in this fuel cycle. So that may not be a main consideration. Might assess for it and rule it out. They have LEU, they don't have any uranium on, they don't have any mining or anything like that, but they do have this uranium inside their fuel assemblies. They could not put them in a reactor. They could divert the assemblies, break the assemblies, take out the pellets in some process. That material's very, it's not really, not that radioactive, you could approach it in a hood, glove box type environment. But they have to do a lot more to it. They gotta break it down, they gotta crush it, they gotta dissolve it, probably convert it into, you have six, they have to have burn enrichment. So there's a lot of capability this state doesn't have in order to make that LEU turn into an HAU weapon. So the SEG would assess for this and say that would take a long time for the state to accomplish. We don't ignore it. We just put less emphasis on this LEU because we're recognizing where the state's capabilities that hopefully you understand very well, take them a long time to turn that into an HAU, a weapon use material, HAU for a moment. But this state, they have plutonium in their spent fuel. So let's see if we analyze for that, begin with that endpoint. Let's say the state wants to aim for plutonium. Okay, the first thing they'd have to do is they have to spend fuel, they have to divert the spent fuel. So they gotta take it out of the dry storage or take it out of the spent fuel ponds, or when it's discharged from the core they've gotta take it out. Although there they'd still have to just stuff the cool for some time. So that would be the first step in this acquisition path is a diversion step. They divert the spent fuel. Next, that spent fuel is no good with all those fission products and actinides and what I mentioned earlier about it, it's highly radioactive, self-protecting, good from a safeguard standpoint, because any processing of that material that's spent fuel requires shielded casts, hot cells, or used to work at large canyons, it did this, but you need remote manipulators, leaded windows, things like that, so sophisticated. But we did notice that they, as we said for this, that they had hot cells in this state. So they have some capability, they have large hot cells. So maybe they could actually process fuel assemblies. Definitely they have the research reactive fuel, maybe the power fuel, and we call that a misuse step. They misuse an existing declared facility. So they've diverted declared material, they've missed you. Again, this is hypothetical, just speculating from an analytical standpoint. But even out of this, they'd probably need one more step in its conversion because usually reprocessing you get either a plutonium nitrate or plutonium oxide. But once you've got, once you've removed the fission products and the actinides, there's not a lot of, then you don't need all this shielding, all these things I was talking about shielded cast. Now it can go back into a, generally a glove box type operation. I used to work in a facility that did this. It was not very, it doesn't have to be very large. So they worked on was pretty large because it had high throughput. It's also say it was in a nuclear weapon state so it was permitted legally. But it's not a big operation. But I just want to highlight here for the accession path analysis, the idea is you've identified a technically plausible path for this state to acquire weapons usable in the material plutonium that consists of three steps, diversion, misuse, and an undeclared step. Yeah. What about the activity of the land or the facility and then there's a diversion in one of the countries? How about I think it's the same thing. Well, generally we're just analyzing at a state level. We're not, we don't really, I mean if they're getting material from another state we'd say yes that material was declared to us, it was exported, it was imported, it's all part of the peaceful nuclear field cycle. We would just recognize that it's now, not in this state, it's in this state. But there may not be any other, I'm not sure if you meant this, there may not be any collusion going on. And generally in accession path analysis we don't consider collusion unless you have information to counter. But generally it's just about a single state's nuclear field cycle capabilities. Again, hypothetical analytical technique. So here we hypothetically said that they have a, I mean as part of the illustration they have a researcher actor with hot cells associated with it. Let's say usually they're making medical isotopes I think that's what we postulate it, that's what they do. Just for the sake of this exercise. So they're basically shifting this researcher actor in the hot cells from what you say molybdenum technician mode of operation. They might have to do some redesigning because they have to have some pretty smart people on the neutron management side that they have to have enough, the thermal power rating has to be enough. But if it's enough or if they upgrade it and they upgrade the cooling if they need to do that, they can misuse this. They basically go from medical isotope production mode to botonium production mode. And they shouldn't be doing that. Their declaration and their design is for medical isotope production. They shouldn't be producing botonium. That's not what their declared stated purpose of that reactor is. That's only by misuse of the facility. So it's undeclared production. They don't tell us about this botonium they're producing and they should. They're obligated to. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not authorized. Yeah, we're just, this is an example that they've diverted the spent fuel and now they have to reprocess it to separate out the botonium inside it. So they got to chop it up, disassemble it. You know, it's a messy process. It requires a lot of shielding, a lot of expertise. They have to have acids and chemicals that are gonna dissolve the material inside that. Usually they cut it up into something called hulls but they'll dissolve the fuel mix out of it along with all these fission products. You have to send it usually if you solve with extraction processes. So the only processes that deal with that for solving the extraction, mix for settlers or pulse columns or something like that. So there's a lot of, in addition to a lot of chemistry know-how, there's a lot of plant know-how they have to have. I should say that doesn't have to be massive. So I mentioned earlier, Japan has reprocessing. They have a huge plant for cash show for covering their plutonium uranium from their large spent fuel inventory. But that's on the order of, I think it's 800 tons a year. You don't need 800 tons. You need like a hundredth of that size. You just need a much smaller scale footprint reprocessing facility. It could be on the order of a hot cell. But you would need some shielding and heavy duty or remote manipulators and that type of equipment for reprocessing for the initial step to start here. Now here, less shielding, less remote operation. Here you would. So just to highlight, that's a diversion step. This is a misuse of a declared facility because they shouldn't be doing it. And then this is a facility they should tell us about if they're introducing any material. They don't even tell us about it. So we're just postulating this might be happening because we have to see how can they complete this path because that gets into how we're gonna cover the path. And I'll move on to show you how we do that. So we have what we call generic and technical objectives. Generic as it sounds is just generic. We're looking for diversion and misuse and undeclared new material and activities. But we have to turn these into specific. We call tailored or customized technical objectives to cover that step that are more specific. And this is what that safeguards and evaluations with that SAG or the operations has to meet. Have to meet these TOs to make sure that we have assured ourselves that our activities conducted radically to make sure that these postulated acquisition paths are not occurring. So we inspect the new material. It hasn't been diverted. It's there. So that path is probably not occurring. But basically TOs help us to plan and guide how we're gonna conduct our activities, allocate resources, things like that. So if I go back to this example, we would have generic objectives. And I just mentioned them. And we turn those into technical objectives. Little more specific. Detect the version of spent fuel assemblies from the reactors or the dry storage. Detect undeclared reprocessing in the research reactor hot cell. Detect undeclared conversion to PV metal in the state. So those are our technical objectives and we have to satisfy ourselves that these are not occurring. So we just speculate that they might, but we conduct activities that will help us confirm that that is not the case. Now just as a general question, do you think to cover this pathway is it more important to meet the first TO on diversion, the second TO on misuse, or the third TO that's related to a totally undeclared Klandestine facility? Well, this would have to go before a committee actually. They'd have to, the state evaluation group, the country hospital would have to sell their approach to the committee. And if they, so to me, it would make sense if they put a lot of emphasis here on the spent fuel. Some emphasis on the reprocessing step. And some, but not too much on the conversion step. I mean, theoretically, if I could cover this conversion step and say this did not happen, I don't have to do anything at these two steps. If this step doesn't happen, they don't get this proposal. But that wouldn't be very sound because then I'll get into this, our measures here are not so good. We don't have an address, we don't have a location. It's probably not going on, shouldn't be going on, hopefully isn't going on. And if it is, it'll be very difficult to find. So we would focus more at the locations where we have an address. We know where this research reactor is. It's under safeguards. You just go there to make sure it's still being used to make medical isotopes and not being converted to PU production-type mode. And the spent fuel, we could check the spent fuel to make sure it is indeed still there. So we put the lion's share of the emphasis on that spent fuel. That would be the highest priority technical objective. We would also check the reprocessing facility and less emphasis on the conversion system. These are just some examples of safeguards measures. I'll go into those in detail. So now we've done this part of our wheel where we've got our approach. Again, as I mentioned, this is fairly academic at this point. We've done all this analytical work at headquarters, but now an inspector's actually got to go into the field and get to kick the tires. So we develop what we call an annual implementation plan. And this will help identify what activities we're going to conduct, what facilities we're going to go to, how often we're going to go to those facilities. Sometimes it gets into random selection probabilities of facilities. And then after we conduct those activities, inspectors will come back. And I think I mentioned earlier, we have those results. They expected one thing when they went to the field and verified the new material. Did the book order, checked the record, seems like that and came back. And if everything's consistent, that's fine. It's an acceptable inspection, but there's any issues they'd have to follow up on. So this is what we refer to as this whole conducting and evaluating activities. So let's go into that a little bit. And these are just some common activities that we do during inspections. So we'll go through these one by one. We compare records and reports. So I talked about that the state is obligated to submit a report. Let's say a physical inventory listing on inventory change report. When we go to the facility, we'll actually check the books. Now they could be smart and they could cook the books and it could be consistent with the paperwork they submitted, everything could add up. But if there's paperwork involving a separate state, that gets a little bit harder to cook the books. But we do a little bit of what we call book auditing. But in addition to just checking the nuclear material countancy aspects, we actually verify the nuclear materials. Here you can see some inspector. This is a fresh storage area. So it looks like they're doing what we call item counting. So physically counting how many assemblies, checking serial numbers, because they may have serial numbers that were provided by the manufacturer, which might be in different countries so they can properly add information. And then we also, in addition to item counting, we can also assay and take measurements of the nuclear material. So here are some instruments that are common. We use HM-5 handheld portable. This is one for measuring UF-6 cylinders. These can get more precise and more accurate. This is a very gross method, if you call it. It just, is there a nuclear material in the drum, in the cylinder or not? Now we can get into what we call partial-type methods. A little more precise, a little more accurate. We can start to get isotopics. We can start to get the rough quantities of nuclear material. Sometimes the standard deviation's a little wide, but still it can get rough. A partial defect test, we call it statistically. And then even further, I don't want to go into too much detail on this, but we can actually get destructive analysis. This is the most precise. So if we analyze a pellet, tell exactly what that pellet was, or sophisticated laboratory and a network of labs that do this for the IEA. And again, we can do isotopics for uranium, for plutonium, and the state would have to declare these isotopics and then we can confirm it. Informal sampling is another powerful tool we have. So this is basically a swipe, like a small square cotton swipe, and it usually comes with what we call a kit. Usually that's six, could be more. So go around and you'll swipe at strategic locations. So if I thought that undeclared nuclear activities may have occurred here, and the state had sanitized the area and tried to clean it up and decommission everything and remove the equipment, I probably wouldn't swipe the floor. I'd probably take a smear, maybe the ventilation duct or inside the grill for the ventilation duct. The only thing is that it's very difficult. If I thought that that might have happened. This is a very sophisticated, powerful tool because the state, if they do have something to conceal, they can sanitize and they can paint, but usually most nuclear processes leave a trace. And this is a very sophisticated, very sensitive tool. It's all sense that sometimes you can get false alarms and get cross-contamination, things like that. But it's a powerful tool for us in terms of detecting undeclared activities. And actually it's been going on for a while. So it's just sort of new over 20 years ago. Now it's a pretty common place with big swipes and all parts. So it's sort of a standard part of agency practices now. Here's two of the laboratories we have. Do we call SAIL, the Cyber's Dwarf Amnitical Laboratory. It's just south of Vienna. And we have a material, a DA lab for destructive analysis and also a swipe lab for the ES analysis. So we can also farm it out. There's amnitical labs that support countries with a network of amnitical laboratories that help out with several countries. And generally for the ES, if it's not urgent, it might, some of this is pretty slow actually. It could take several months for the results to come back for it to be analyzed and evaluated. So that could, it's long and drawn out. Same thing for DA samples can last sometimes months. But if it's urgent, as opposed to routine, then it can happen in about a quarter of weeks or a few weeks. Now we have all other devices. I mentioned this fictitious fuel cycle we're talking about had spent fuel. So we have devices that can measure what's known as Trenkov radiation that's given off by spent fuel. Generally, if some of you've been at spent fuel pounds on a reactor discharge, this is visible to the naked eye at first. Right away for a few weeks, maybe in a few months. But then it tends to decay away. For the first to discharge, you can see it. But after months or years, you're not going to see that anymore with the visible naked eye. But this instrument can pick it up. You can still pick up this Trenkov radiation for years afterwards. Decades in some cases, if it's high burn of fuel. So that's a tool we have to verify spent fuel in a time that that fuel is indeed spent fuel. Because if they take an assembly out, as part of that diversion step, well, they're not going to leave a blank because they'll probably say, well, you had 500 assemblies last time over here. Now you have 480. So if they did divert 20 assemblies, they'll probably, as best they can, fabricate 20 dummies that look like those spent fuel assemblies. They probably won't have the same signature as the earlier ones that had plutonium and cesium and spent fuel and fission product and a fragment, things like that, that are giving off certain gamma certain gamma spectrum, which we can detect with instruments. I talked about seals. We can apply seals. This is a fairly standard, what we call a metal seal. Very simple, very reliable. We also have what we call in situ seals where you can verify them in place. This is what we call a Cobra seal. And for this one, I would have to detach this and bring it back to Vienna, have the inside of this seal checked and verified. This one I can do in the field. And this last one, electronic seal, can also be done in the field. So if someone opened one of these wires or cut this wire, you go to verify that seal would say there's some event, the seal has been opened. Could be closed again, they could open and close it. But it's all, that's all saved in the seal, any kind of event like that. So you'd say, well, there was no inspector here who opened the seal. So again, you'd have an issue or an inconsistency, you'd have to resolve. We also have, we used quite a bit of surveillance. So cameras and so it's also main purposes to maintain continuity of knowledge. So it's like they close up the core, they refuel and before the inspector leaves, and we may not go back there until the next refueling. So it could be 12 months, 15 months, 18 months. So we can install cameras overlooking the pond. They have a certain picture taking intervals. So they're not video cameras, but they can have short intervals. And then we can come back later and it's saved on a storage media to take the media out and use software to review it and see if it was an uneventful, close core period if nothing happened. We don't expect much. Now during a refueling period, there's a lot of activity as components are removed and put back in, so you expect a lot of activity. But during a close core period, you don't expect that much of it. So it's just another way to maintain continuity of knowledge. And if something unusual, if there was a cast that came in and a cast that came out and that's on surveillance and the operator and the state told us nothing about it, that would be an issue. That would be an inconsistency. It's a, well, we saw a cast come out on our camera. He didn't tell us about it. It's an anomaly, we'd have to resolve. So we may have to go verify that pond again. Even if it was accidental, they put a cast in and for some reason training or something and took it out. But if we didn't get to verify that that cast was empty when it came out, because these cameras can see the top of the pond, looks like it's been a field pond. They can't see underneath the water. I talked about design information verification. We can actually go to all phases of the life cycle. So when they're under construction commissioning, that's the best time to go actually to crawl around because nothing's hot yet. You can get a pretty good understanding how the facility is designed to operate. So we're just confirming that, even all the way through to decommissioning. And also as part of this process, we're validating our safeguards approach. So where are we gonna put these cameras? Where are we gonna seal the core? Are we gonna seal the equipment hatch? Things like that. As I mentioned earlier, if we can do this earlier in the process, if there's a new design, we could talk earlier about the generation four designs. So some of these newfangled fancier reactors came out, like fast breeder reactors. Next is one in Japan, Manjoo, but other than that, there's not too many, but they're very complicated to safeguard. So the earlier we can get involved in that process, the more optimal the safeguards measures can be down the road when it finally becomes under construction. I talked about commercial satellite imagery. Oftentimes we'll get a declaration from the state of sort of a sketch of what their site looks like, site declaration of buildings. Well, satellite imagery, the analysts can actually overlay that onto the actual imagery. I think you see this on your iPhone now, some of the GPS technology. But they can see if there's a, so quickly it'll tell them if there's a building that's not identified. It's not on the site declaration, but it's the overhead imagery. But some sites can have hundreds of buildings, some small, some large. Could be a little bit misleading. I'd been on CAs where I was told there was a building, and I went to that area and I couldn't find a building, and I finally realized it was basically a bicycle port. I had a little roof on it, like a tin roof on it. So at the ground truth level, it wasn't a building at all. I was like, where is this building? And it was, ah, the satellite is seeing straight down. It thinks this is a building, it thinks it's a roof. Maybe this resolved, and say it's not a building, it's a bike port or something. In that case, what now seems good. So most of these, you can resolve pretty quickly. The other thing satellite imagery can help you to look at change detection over time, as a facility's under construction, or if they change this, they're trying to get rid of the facility or clean up the area. It's a case of cereal, I think, that a probable reactor, which was bombed, but then it was sort of cleaned up and sanitized. And you can augment it with other types of, if it's a cloudy day or whatever, you can use radar and things like that for new satellites to also augment. So this is very advanced now. There's also quite a few commercial satellite providers. So this is pretty exotic, definitely 30 years ago, probably only a few states have the capability. But now it's, there's a lot more satellite imagery, commercial providers. There may still be some restrictions from the states that, where those companies are operating from. But generally there's a lot more commercial satellite imagery and that my understanding is the costs have come down quite a bit. I just mentioned it because it's a very powerful tool. It's also a tool the state may not know that we're using. They may not know exactly when the satellite is gonna be overhead and something when taking pictures at angles and my understanding is now it's so fast that it's almost like, in some cases, like a short video of the area they're trying to take pictures. So overhead imagery, very powerful tool and it may drive some potential proliferators underground. They might do things underground so the signature isn't as noticeable on the surface. But that digging and stuff could also stir up an indication. But I should say you'd almost have to have some kind of location-specific information unless you have a small army of people and analysts to do this or the agency would probably need some tip or location-specific information in order to focus a commercial satellite imagery on a certain section of the country. So returning to our path and our objectives and our measures, so for safeguards activities that first step was declared spent fuel. So I mentioned a bunch of these. We could do things like measure the spent fuel, the ICVD, this trinkoff fueling device, make sure it's spent fuel that hasn't been diverted and replaced with dummies. When a state transfers or spent fuel to dry storage, we usually verify with the different instrumentuses of fork detector, they actually underwater, stick the assembly in there and this will measure the gamma-nutrient counts and determine roughly based on burn-up how old that assembly is so we can confirm that it's spent fuel and almost not so precise but roughly one of his discharge and cooling time, these like that. Then I talked about the seals and the surveillance. So that would be part of normal measures to cover this spent fuel step. So if these are coming back fine, that spent fuel hasn't been diverted or had. We'll say first perspective. The reprocessing step with the hot cells with some measures and activities we could do there. It'd be things like the environmental sample. We could take a smear inside the hot cell, it's usually done with remote manipulators. But usually a hot cell will have a certain signature in it and usually we've done a baseline so we're familiar with that signature and it's in the agency database so this is the type of signature that you'll see in this hot cell. So if we take another hot cell a year later, two years, three years, five years later, we'll see an entirely different signature that maybe is indicating while they're not really doing medical isotope production, now we're getting hits and particles that are related to plutonium separation in this hot cell. You don't have to ask why is that. So again, we'll come back from these laboratories, there's evaluation people to look at what's expected and very detailed so they'll get into later but it's a very powerful tool in this environmental sample. The other thing we could check in this hot cell, we could just physically look inside the windows. If we're familiar with the reactor operation, let's say the research reactor, if we look in the hot cells, we should see the same equipment to glassware, labware, chemicals that are used for the medical isotope production, should be a probably relatively small scale operation. And if they go to plutonium production mode, I expect the equipment would change a little bit. It might be large, I'm sure the unit operations would change, the chemicals would change. You have to kind of mask that but something would change inside the hot cells. So you could even take a picture of normal, the inspector could come back a year or two later with that picture and look at the picture, look at the hot cells, okay, see roughly the same layout inside the hot cells, that's drastically different. There's a lot of times inspectors can't be familiar with every type of operation and they're going to different facilities all the time. So these would be two activities we could do to make sure this hot cell is not being misused and hopefully it isn't and we could conclude that the facility was operated as expected as designed. For this conversion step, it's a little trickier because as I mentioned earlier, it's probably not going on, hopefully not going on. We're not going to know where it's going on unless we have some location specific information to indicate the location. So here we rely more on what we call open source that someone might write an article on a journal related to plutonium separation or metallurgy and that's highly unlikely because the program would probably be very, very isolated but in the event they did in a research mode that might be an indication. So we look at things like open source type information. Generally if you're seeing, you should say if you're seeing a lot of open source that would be, that's one thing but if all of a sudden that information was cut off and dropped off or it turns to zero, you'd say that actually might be suspicious. So all of a sudden we had a lot of information and research and then we just dried up all of it. And we could also do what I mentioned that the complementary access where we can check a site, we can bring instruments, there shouldn't be any new material in this room if I brought an HN5 and there's no declarative material, I could take a survey instrument, I could just go around and make sure that's the case. But again, I'd have to have a location, I couldn't just scour the country walking around and let's say I have to have some information on where to do the complementary access. So we talked about these three sides of the wheel and now we get up until this information comes back, we evaluate it and we have to resolve any differences and we call safeguards findings and did our findings support our technical objectives? That part on this side of the wheel where we establish these technical objectives, did we actually meet those technical objectives? Did we have any inconsistencies, any issues, any anomalies that have to be resolved? So we evaluate the safeguards activities, did we meet our technical objectives? If we didn't, there might be a good reason, maybe we had a safety mishap at the facility, we couldn't get access, let's say here at the hot zone. Well, it's a problem if we can't get access like we expected, but there could be a legitimate reason for that, a legitimate safety reason. So we could either wait until the mishap is over and come back in a few months, or we could be more upstream, be more assured that this, go visit the pond, the spent fuel pond sooner than we had planned on it. So we could change our plan and we've had something comes up. And again, we're always looking for consistency with safeguards, with all the other safeguards relative to the information we have. If there's inconsistency, if it's minor, usually can be worked out at the facility level, if it still can't be resolved, it usually gets elevated and inspectors usually call back to Vienna and form the senior inspector, the section head, the director, depending on the nature and the magnitude of the issue. If it's a very serious issue or a serious anomaly, like if the inspector was denied access, if there's new material that's missing or equipment has been interfered with or tampered with and there's other suspicious indicators, then it can rise to a much higher level could go to what we call the DDG, DG eventually to the Board of Governors, which would have to be a very serious, a very serious issue. So hopefully these will resolve mostly at a much lower level. I'll just give you an example of how one might be resolved. So we talked about this, we have this research reactor hot cell. And the state declares that the only deal with low and rich geranium in this hot cell. But if we take a sample and it goes to these IEA laboratories, it's analyzed and indicates HAU particles. So let's say they said 5%, but we're seeing 37% or 69%. This would be strange. And it would be a red flag and it'd be something odd here we have to get to the bottom of it. Could be perhaps cross contamination, the laboratory is pretty good about things like that. Could be inspector cross contamination to brought the contamination from the last inspection, but generally they're pretty good and they do a pretty swipe checks to make sure that isn't the case. So we just have to investigate it resolved and find out why, because this is a big deal. We got HAU particles. Said you're dealing with LEU, but we got looks like HAU. Could be that maybe this was something from the past. It's a legacy contamination issue from the 60s or something. And the state digs into their archive and says, one time we did do HAU in this room or in this area and we did have that isotopic composition. We'd have to maybe confirm that, check with other records, things like that. But in the end it could be everything's okay. Issues resolved, it's back to being consistent. So a lot of times issues are dissolved like this because a lot of states will have legacy issues, especially states with complicated complex nuclear fuel cycles. And if those nuclear fuel cycles got underway in the 1960s and 70s, most of these safeguards, measures kicked in in the 60s or 70s, but more of the advanced measures like environmental sampling came later. So our tools are very powerful and also we detect things from the past. They're just part of the peaceful legacy nuclear fuel cycle. So again, if there's anomalies, these would be raised and they'd be escalated at the appropriate level and followed up. And I think I talked about this, most issues resolved at the state level. It's seriously not if it could go to the DDG or higher, it could be to the DDG and to the board of government. So I just want to highlight all these different groups, analysts and inspectors in the field, analysts at headquarters and inspectors in the field are constantly evaluating all this information that's coming in through verification, consistency analysis, and they're constantly checking everything against the other. Is it all adding up? Is it to look like any of these plausible pathways that we pose for the state are materialized? So we're just checking things. And then finally, after we do that, we get into these findings and observations, we draw what we call our safeguards conclusions for the state. So in order to do this, we have to make sure there's no anomalies, questions and consistencies, those are resolved satisfactorily. The technical objectives I talked about have been met in a consistent and timely manner. And there's no issue that indicates there might be something untoward going on in the state that we would have a safeguards concern. If all that's met, and this is usually the case, this is pretty boring. So the conclusion is just really straightforward. There's no diversion of declarative material, no diversion of declarative material, and no indication of undeclared material activities. Those are generally the conclusions we make. We would draw these every year. So again, information provided by the state, we evaluate it, prepare a plan, state level approach, conduct activities, we get information results from those activities, we compare it to the information the state provided along with other open source type information. If everything's okay, we draw a credible sound conclusion for the state that there's been no diversion of declarative material, like the spent fuel in the example, and no undeclared material activities like the misuse or the undeclared stuff. And we publish this annually in what's called the safeguards implementation report or the SAR usually comes out in the May timeframe, and that's where the conclusions are documented for the year. And the wording on those conclusions is a bit legal and I think the lawyer will go over these tomorrow in more detail, but for states with this comprehensive safeguards agreement and APs and force, all of the material are made of peaceful activities. They don't have this broader conclusion, which takes some time where we have this certain level of understanding about the state that we're certain that there's no undeclared material activity going on. But that's not the case. And instead of just saying all of the material, we say declared material made of peaceful activities because there may be some ongoing work that they get from declared to all. And if they don't have an additional protocol, it's just a comprehensive safeguards agreement. Remember that first box that was limited from the back says to all the information in the state or access to all the locations in the state. Again, we would just say declared material. Yeah. Do you have any information on the work of the state? Yeah, sure. So a broader conclusion came up basically in the late 90s, initially the agency just made a conclusion on the version of declared material. So if we confirm that the material was still there, all the material balance evaluations were closed properly. The conclusion was there was no diversion of declared material. We found this was a weakness in the 90s because there were several cases, there were several, but a couple of case studies like Iraq and other states where it wasn't just about diverting declared material. There was undeclared activity going on at declared sites and in other parts of the state. For the case of Iraq, it was extensive. So it indicated to the agency in the early 90s that the current regime wasn't working just looking at declared material. So the emphasis shifted, this is when this additional protocol came around where it gave us more information and access that enabled the agency to confirm what we call, to make a broader conclusion. Not just on the diversion, but to broaden that to, there's no indication of undeclared nuclear thrill. And I should just say it's no indication. Maybe we just didn't look in the right place. But hopefully we've looked hard enough and this process to get to this broader conclusion is pretty exhaustive. We go through all this information and it's very extensive. We do a lot of these complementary access type visits. But the state gets a lot of attention to get until this broader conclusion's reached. It might drop off a little bit, but we still give the state quite a bit of attention on its AP declarations. So that's what we call this broader conclusion. Well, it's not really a state that's enough to agree to. What the state has to agree to is to ratifying the additional protocol legally. So it's entered into force, so we have this increased information and access. Once we have that, it's just by procedure and by policy and the agency after depends on the complexity of the state could take a year, two, three years. Sometimes the issues could be very complex. So it could be four, five, six years to resolve an issue. But if that's done, then we could have a higher level of certainty that there's no indication of undeclared material, no indication of undeclared activities going on, nothing untoward. Then we could say there's no indication of this and we give that state, we call it granted the broader conclusion. And that's reaffirmed every year, so we have to continue to check that. So there's this diversion, it was the non-diversion conclusion, now we call it the broader conclusion. And I'd have to check, I think we have about, so every state would get a conclusion every year, but there's only about, I have to check, I think it's around almost 70 states, maybe high 60, 70 states that have this broader conclusion. And then I didn't get into this in detail, we also have what we call item-specific agreements for 66 states, insert 66 states. This is India, Pakistan, Israel, they get their own type of conclusion because states that didn't sign the MPT could still have access to nuclear material facilities and our conclusion is just focused on that, the nuclear material facility that was supplied to make sure that wasn't nuclear chosen diverted but the facility wasn't misused. So it's a very narrow type of conclusion. And it's similar for VOAs, Military Offer Agreements, this is another way of saying on nuclear weapons states, so this is the five nuclear weapons states, they could also have the material that they offer for safeguards. That material is offered, we check, make sure it hasn't been removed from safeguards. Sometimes a state that isn't a nuclear weapons state, they ship material to a nuclear weapons state and they want it safe, so we'll have to apply safeguards to it. An example might be Japan had spent fuel, Japan is not a nuclear weapons state under the MPT, they send it to France, let's say, which is a nuclear weapons state under the MPT and that material will be under safeguards in France. It seems a bit strange because it was Japanese material and we're drawing a conclusion for Japan but Japan, more invested in it. They put it, they send it to France because France reprocessed it to get the mox fuel and they send the mox fuel back to Japan for the reactors. Well, again, I just want to highlight this is the safeguard processes, I went through it kind of quick but this is a very iterative dynamic process, it's ongoing simultaneously, there could be parts going on over here, over here, so the state evaluation group is very busy. Obviously, if we do anything poorly, we could understand the state capabilities very well but if we think the research reactor is five megawatts and it's actually 25 megawatts, we're gonna make a different assessment about the capabilities of that research reactor so we may not identify the correct, technically plausible acquisition path. So I just want to highlight if we, even if we don't understand the state well, it doesn't matter if we do great APA, we're still gonna get poor results and it'll feed forward into the rest of the process and likewise, we can understand the state real well and if we do shoddy, accuracy path analysis, don't take it seriously, we might not fully identify all the technically plausible past and again, can spiral into poor quality safeguards. We also have, I should have mentioned earlier, we have committees that independently check and assure that this kind of erosion is an occurrence. Yeah. This says that life cycle is open for the industry. So I can ask for Mali for the agency or the state leader and board for the agency. Yeah, and you won't get it because it's an internal document. So these documents, I probably should have emphasized that at the state evaluation port, we put out something called the state evaluation level up here where we collect and analyze information. That state evaluation group will periodically document their understanding of the state and we call state evaluation report or an SCR. That is an internal document, highly confidential, is an issue to the state. Likewise here, this accuracy path analysis and the state level approach, the game plan basically for safeguarding the state is an internal document because it gets into the frequency and intensity of how we're gonna do activities. We'll get into the selection probability. So if they have 10 reactors, we may not go to all the reactors. We may randomly select some of them some years and not go to the other ones. That's statistically supported to be 20% or 50%. So it'll be a randomness and unpredictability that's added to it. If the state had that document and knew, oh, they're showing up 20% of the time and they would have a leg up on the cliff. And likewise down here, we have this annual implementation plan that comes out. That's a very sensitive document because it again tells exactly where we're going and when we're going. So that can't be released to the state. The state implementation report generally is released but it's done through the board of governors. The board of governors would get a copy of that. And that's the general overarching conclusions I was talking about about all declared with the material remained in peaceful use, things like that. But generally speaking to answer your question, no, the state wouldn't get a copy of that. However I should add, the agency would consult with the state because sometimes we have to implement a measure many of the state's cooperation just can't install so I didn't mention in here, one thing the agency has for verification they have remote monitoring. So I talked about the surveillance systems. Well in the past the inspector had to go into the field, service the camera, take out the flash card or the media and bring it back to review it. But it started a while ago, 10, 12 years ago we implemented what we call remote monitoring. The data is transmitted remotely, agency headquarters could also be a regional office and the data can be reviewed there. We just can't do that without the state knowing about it. So the state would have to agree to that. Usually it's in their interest because we can find out if there's any issues. And if there was something that was accidental, something that was, I just forgot to tell us about, it's better that we find out about that sooner and remote monitoring allows that capability. Also if our equipment breaks, you may not know about it. If we go to visit, we'll just find out how this equipment broke. And that's a problem for everyone because now we'll say, well, sorry, our equipment broke, but we can't draw a conclusion. We've got a problem, we still have to verify this new material that was under surveillance. But if we have remote monitoring, that could tell us sooner in the process that the equipment is about to break or it's failing and there's a weakness or some problem. And that we call it state of health information is transmitted to the agency and it can tell us if there's an equipment problem. So we can find out sooner. So that would be an example. We'd have to have the state involved but just can't install equipment. Likewise, if we want to do, in some states we do what we call unannounced inspections, so don't give any notification to the state. But we just can't do this in a state. They have to at least agree to the principle and the procedures we're going to use. So we're not notifying when we do the unannounced inspection but they have to be aware that this regime exists that we can do it otherwise. We just show up at the gate and knock and say I'm here for an unannounced inspection and say we don't know what you're talking about. If they're used to predictable quarterly or annual inspections. But the state may like that because it may reduce the amount of resources they need in terms of accompanying agency safeguards inspectors. So there's certain aspects I should highlight that. We have to cooperate with the state. Then we need to and should to make it smooth to implement certain safeguards measures. That's it. Thanks for your attention. It's a lot of material. You'll get some more tomorrow on the legal aspects actually gave you basically for new inspectors they get this in about four months. So condensed and really shrunk down so a lot of information. So if you feel overwhelmed don't worry about it. The idea is just to give you a feeling for the safeguards. So if you go back as managers in your facilities in your states, you'll have an appreciation for some of these. You can't absorb it all day and I don't expect it to. Just there's a lot of material and it's also involved. Let's change over time to make things more effective. Any questions on safeguards? Yeah. We're going by a political issue. Just as an example, I mean generally it shouldn't. The agency is a technical organization probably is at high very high levels is probably political influence. But it's the inspector analyst level that shouldn't come into play. We just have a job to do. We have to verify new material, report or information comes in. Now sometimes some inspectors, some sections may go a bit too deep and maybe there's nothing there and the state may not like that and it could be justified. Maybe you can back off but maybe you're doing too much. You can get a little bit out of balance if one SEG is inspecting to one level and it doesn't make sense to the state. And maybe we need to look at that and say look back at your plan, your state level approach. Does that make sense? Are we overdoing it? Re-evaluate your access paths? Things like that. Some states may have some SEGs and analysts may have analyzed differently than others. However, I mentioned this committee process, the review hopefully that injects some harmony into this so there isn't similar fuel cycles and one fuel cycle is getting a lot of bells and whistles, a lot of safeguards measures and another one isn't getting much or a lot less. It shouldn't be that kind of imbalance. Should be similar and should be consistent. May not be identical because no two nuclear fuel cycles are identical, some are similar, but capabilities know how past experience, past capabilities, even if the commission could give one state more know-how on certain parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. Yeah. Yeah. Not really, but there's not a document like that, but there is communication between state evaluation groups. So if one state is hearing information about another state and they need to resolve it, those two SEGs, a state evaluation group should sit together and resolve it. This happens a lot of times just for normal day-to-day activities because declarations will come in from one state and that may need to be corroborated by another SEG, so they may ask about that information from the other state evaluation group. But generally, they tend to work kind of independently because the information is confidential. We have to have, we call need, I need to know and I need to share that information. And what does it look like if you come to this and you have to make a statement that it's not something like that to give? Yeah. No, we don't really look at collusion. That's not part of it. As I mentioned earlier, two states are colluding a fuel cycle and a clandestine activity. Both SEGs are trying to make sure that isn't happening in both states. Now, there could be cases of, this is what you mean, where one state may have something that the other state needs. One may have uranium, but no capability to enrich it, let's say. The other state may not have uranium resources, but the capability to enrich it. So we would look for that in the state that has enrichment. We're also looking for any misuse that a enrichment facility that involves domestic uranium or gets the uranium from another source. But generally, as part of the exercise of that analysis in the state level approach, it doesn't consider that collusion is going on. But if there was information indicate that, then those two SEGs would get together and share that information and assess it and run it to the ground. Yeah. And we thought that the state would not be able to make questions about such a deal with the state would they expect each other to much in the same level of the... Yeah, it's a good question. I didn't mention it at all, and you mentioned tomorrow's part of legal aspects. In Argentina and Brazil, for example, there's a group called ABAC and they have their own arrangement. It started in the early 90s when they both entered into what we call comprehensive safeguards agreements under 153. And they established their own SSAC, their own inspector, their own national inspector, but a little bit independent. So they have their state authorities and then they have this independent they call regional authority. Euratoma is another major one. So over a lot of the European countries they have a European commission has their own inspector. From the agency standpoint, we would consider this, and we work with them and their counterparts in terms of inspections. Sometimes it saves effort because they also have similar measures. They have cameras and seals and they'll take advantage of that. Generally, the agency has to derive independent findings. So I'd say we use this information and we work together, but we also have to be careful to make sure that our conclusion is independently derived. And how, what you said about how the agency provides the most generation that I've worked with, the refresh rate is more than 5% and 20% of the current work is going to be in the future. And then we're going to do the inspection and then we're going to do the inspection. Yeah, in general, the nuclear fuel cycle hasn't changed so much. However, not as similar with this fourth generation of the fast breeder reactors, but there are other ones that are coming down the pike that are going to create some interesting safeguards, challenges. We only have floating reactors. So there's a few countries now, France, China, Russia that have designs built and I think France and China are close to commissioning these units. And they're tend to be, and right now it's not really an issue for the agency because these are nuclear weapon states. And again, this is the lawyer who'll go into this tomorrow. Under the NPT, when that was established in late 1969 came to effect, 1970, there was five states that were nuclear weapon states and they got out of a lot of safeguards as well. So this would be one area. So it's not under safeguards but if they export that technology, let's say to a coastal region that wants a floating reactor or a floating barge, I don't know if the thermal power, I think it's on the order of 200 or 300 megawatts, so it might be good for a small sized city, that could have some advantages. You provide electricity, maybe the state's developing and they don't have the time to develop their own infrastructure. And then when they no longer need that electricity, well, the host country just pulls it back to their own country, so it's gone. There's no D&D, no installation on your soil, no environmental, long-term D&D, so it has advantages. So these are the kinds of innovations we'd have to say, we have to figure out a safeguards approach, not safeguards, how to safeguard this, because essentially it could become a step. So we always come back from an analytical standpoint, again, probably staying up nights, maybe overly suspicious, but I'll say how could they misuse this floating reactor? The state that gets, maybe they can't, maybe they have no control over the reactor, it's still under the state that provided it. So we would still look at it that way and then apply certain measures, but it's good to get in on the ground floor because we can maybe make it so it's very difficult to misuse this or if it is, we would identify that very quickly. Another example is that a presentation on small modular reactors, and there's a company in Canada that wants to use these in Canada for, so domestically, mainly for remote areas. And they're generally low thermal power reactors. I mean, they're not, I don't think they're building yet, I think it's still just a design idea, but I think it's gonna prove that the design, and that's a challenge because now we start to disperse the power. So instead of having a 1,000 megawatt plant in one single place, a single address, or maybe a couple of units at one site, now you're getting maybe 10, 20, 30 of these dispersed. And for candidates to hit remote regions where they have mining, putting in power source there. But we still have to safeguard it. But if this can be fairly, kind of like a maintenance-free battery, if it's a maintenance-free type reactor, it just goes in place, as used. So it's spent, let's say a year, two, three years, whatever lasts, the company comes and takes a small modular reactor back, they're replaced with another one. Then we just have to safeguard, it's basically an item, a unit, it's not so much something that could be misused. Perhaps we'll use something different like satellite energy, some sort of global positioning. So constantly trying to innovate and our technical measures, if there's a new way to safeguard some. And if we find out about these next generation technologies and go into it a little bit sooner, fast-preter reactors are hard because I used to inspect at Manjoo and anything that has liquid metal or anything just becomes a problem because usually it's not transparent. So at normal LWRs, we're used to seeing above the water, we see the fuel, we can item count, we can keep an eye on the fresh fuel, the core fuel, the spent fuel, all the key measurement points. But for a fast-preter reactor, this gets a lot messier quickly. In fact, at Manjoo, there's a lot of installed, non-destructive assay type gate monitors to monitor where the fuel is flowing. That reactor's actually shut down. It was gonna be brought back online, but never had a small incident, but never came back online after machine, or maybe it won't, but I'm not sure the latest with that typical. But there aren't too many of these exotic reactors, fairly just the traditional LWRs, PWRs, PWRs and Canvue. So it's a fairly traditional nuclear fuel cycle. My own view is I think the nuclear fuel cycle after three mile island and then Chernobyl is making a recovery, and then Fukushima and some parts of the world, maybe mainly in the West, it's really slow things up. So countries like Germany changed course and started shutting down reactors. So their nuclear fuel cycle's kind of in decline. I think a few other states, Switzerland and other one might be reconsidering their nuclear fuel cycle plans for the future. The US had a couple of reactors, I think it's South Carolina that were about to come online. I think those are on hold now. Maybe not just entirely because of Fukushima, because that was six or seven years ago, but also because of finance and so on. But they tend to be fairly standard, tried and true designs. But there may be some breakthroughs and then the safeguards challenges will arise. Any other questions on safeguards, safeguards applications, inspecting analysts, anything like that? This one or this one? That's a good question. Most states are, I mean members of the IEA. Well, they're not members of the IEA, but I mean you can be a member. It's kind of tricky. That's a good question for the legal guy tomorrow actually. You can be a member of the IEA. You may not have any nuclear material, and you may not get a, basically if you have a comprehensive safeguards agreement in force, if you have a CSA, you get a conclusion. So there might be a handful of states, trying to think maybe small Pacific Island type states, or that don't have one. Or there could be a new state that comes about like South Sudan that's still working out their agreement or something and they're not in effect yet, something like that, I don't know. But generally, this would apply to all states. It's about, let's say like 181, 182 member states. But if you don't have nuclear material, it's still, there's something I think I should highlight. If you have a very small nuclear fuel cycle, just almost nothing, something called the small quantities protocol, or legally, you don't have to get all the bells and whistles of a comprehensive safeguards agreement, as long as you stay below a certain amount of nuclear material, so it's very low levels. You couldn't, it'd be very difficult to acquire weapons with nuclear material because it's just very limited. So we call that an SQP status. As long as you need those eligibility limits and the criteria for that, you can have this. We would still draw a conclusion, but we'd do a lot less in that state because there's a lot less nuclear material, and the agency would just verify that very infrequently. It might just have a loft location outside of a facility, a small university-type thing, and it might go there every three, four, or five years. But generally, there would still be a conclusion. Sometimes we didn't do much in terms of activities to support that conclusion, but over time we do, which we would, it's over a three or four-year period. So there's something we refer to as in the statistical inference. So even if I didn't select that to be verified, that facility, that nuclear material, I can still broaden that because I could have selected the entire population over certain times, and I can still make the case that I could have showed it, I could have verified it. Now, if it's a very low selection probability, it starts to get a little shaky, it's got to be a certain amount, and there's a whole section of the statistician to the agency that confirm these types of selection probabilities and detection probabilities. It would depend on their agreement, and unless it's, let me say a non-member stadium, I'm not totally understanding. Well, it may not be their call because if they want to be part of the NPT, if they've signed on to the NPT, then they have obligations associated with that. One of them is they've got to declare all their material in their facilities and they've got to open them up for inspection. So if they didn't do that, they're not in compliance with NPT basically. We would be a little bit lower in a sense of confirming a comprehensive safeguards agreement, but that's coming directly out of the NPT because they have to put this agreement in place. So they would not be, it basically wouldn't be meeting your, wouldn't be in compliance with their agreement. And they definitely wouldn't get, if they hadn't got the material, we'd have to access that and provide a conclusion. And sometimes, you know, I'm thinking about this and you know, the SEGs will get, the state evaluation grids will get caught up and I think, you know, we're not, the agency, we don't work here at the agency to draw conclusions for ourselves. That's so it can put out a nice document. This is to provide credible assurance to other states that might be concerned about that state. Say nothing's going on in that state. So if we can't draw a credible conclusion, we can't, we can't, we'd be misleading. We're giving a false sense of assurance. So we have to make sure it's technically sound and if we've done enough activities and met those technical objectives I was talking about, then we could hopefully meet that, a sound, incredible safeguards conclusion. But people, you know, states are relying on this because they've committed, though they've joined this group, this treaty, let's say okay, we'll join this treaty. We're giving up some of our securities opportunity in a way because they're also committing that they're not gonna pursue nuclear weapons but they're expecting everyone else to be doing the same thing and they're relying on the agency to make sure everyone is doing that. So if someone is playing a game, it would be obviously incumbent on the agency that that is the case and we confirm that to communicate that to the wider nonproliferation community. And that's what happens to the safeguards implementation report. So annually, we provide these conclusions. Any other questions? Yeah. I have a few questions. What's the reason why you're trying to find some of the information on the use of nuclear weapons? Maybe through the use of nuclear weapons? I don't know. The information wouldn't be directly shared. It came from, that's highly confidential information. It came from one state, let's say through accountancy or some sort of declaration. And the agency has to be very careful when they handle that information. But if I understood the question correctly, would we provide that information directly as evidence to another state? No, that wouldn't happen. The fact that something might be occurring or the allegation that might be communicated might be communicated to a wider audience. First, that information would have to be corroborated usually through other sources and other independent means before the agency just jumped out on some limb to make sure that it's sound. I don't know, in our safeguards implementation report, there was a case in Syria, I think it was in 2007, they were building something and it was bombed. So the way the agency found out about it, so it was my understanding, I don't work on that state of aviation group, was it was in the newspaper basically, because Israel bombed this reactor, this probable reactor. So I think in the early days, the wording was it's a possible reactor and the agency official wording and terminology. And then later, I think in the 2000, sure exactly, 12, 15 timeframe, it turned into a probable reactor. I don't work on that state, I've never inspected in the states, I'm just giving you my own personal view or opinion speculation. I think that's a state that has their own security concerns in isolation and probably going back to the 70s and 80s, obviously there's still just an armistice in terms of peace on the Korean Peninsula. So they probably have their own security concerns and out of that, maybe acquiring nuclear weapon capability was perceived as vital from their standpoint. So maybe that's what they were pursuing all along. I don't know that, they could have been acquiring research and other technologies from other states under a peaceful analysis of a peaceful program. Now they weren't a member of the NPT, I'm not sure exactly when they signed, when they put a comprehensive safeguards agreement in force and they came out with their first initial listing, there was some doubt about that, that they list everything every time they've operated their research lab. So there's some doubt initially and then there's a lot of frameworks and cooperation over the years involving multiple states. I don't know, I think they maybe were playing for time, they'd be negotiating a little bit, cheating a little bit, negotiating a little bit, that's just my opinion. So they probably took advantage of a system in order to gain time to acquire know-how and capability. But from their perspective, again, maybe they view it as they have an imminent security concern and that's they decided that overrides their obligations to the NPT or whatever. But they also, I don't know in exact dates, but they basically threatened to leave the NPT. With the NPT, you can leave, you have to give 90-day notifications like leaving your apartment, I guess. So they did this and gave this notification and then I think at the 88 through 89 days suspended it. Then later, I think several years later, they re-activated it, but only waited a day or two for the full-night days to expire and they left the NPT. And there's been efforts to go back and look at parts of their fuel cycle. But they had a reprocessing facility which they'd known about and inspected, but they apparently also had an enrichment going on which they didn't inform the agency about. Although they didn't, they did invite some foreigners to look at that and they think they confirmed that they saw it looked like a gas energy future rich implant. They basically modified the facility fuel fabrication for enrichment, but not under safeguards. But they'd also left the NPT. There's other states, and I know that just if you leave the NPT or you never join the NPT, the NPT has been probably successful. Only one state has left it. Three states with complex nuclear fuel cycles have yet to sign on to the NPT. So they're not violating the NPT by having nuclear weapons. But it may limit their access in terms of just commercial nuclear trade. Some states may not trade. The states that haven't signed the NPT that's one of the benefits of signing the NPT is you get advantages. You get, talking about these research reactors really, you get research reactor technology. That might be a starting point to understand for training for your medical isotopes, industrial isotopes. And usually it starts with a research reactor and expands into a power plant. So you get the benefits of nuclear energy, which is actually, that's the mission of the IEA is to promote and accelerate the uses of nuclear energy. I just work in the department that's a little more paranoid to make sure that when the materials facilities are provided, they come with strings attached, the strings that are attached to these inspections and this verification and these conclusions. Probably not the best outlook because instead of like, what is it? Now, trust but verify. I guess I'm more the outlet. Don't trust and verify. But at the end of the day, I can, I just walk. I approach things with that because it's a what if for all states. But I can always step back at the end and say, okay, we took a very conservative outlook and there was nothing going on. Our conclusions are sound. There's been no diversion and there's no indication of undeclared nuclear activities. But I think it's good to go in with an outlook that you're looking for and you don't find it as opposed to saying, ah, this is the same old state. I've actually had states say that to me. I've had, I've been inspecting some states and they say, gosh, you're treating us like a round or something. It's a, you know, another state, it's a non-controversive state. To me, I'm thinking, okay, then I'm doing my job. If they think they're getting a lot of intense verification, that's within the scope of the inspection. And I'm doing my job because I feel like I've got a, I can't say, oh, this is, you know, whatever Belgium or Bolivia or Germany or Canada, I'm not, you know, nothing going on here. Then things start to fall apart. Start to lose credibility. Any other questions? All right, okay. Thank you.