ESARDA

The European SAfeguards Research and Development Association (ESARDA) was created in 1969 and provides a forum for international exchange in the field of safeguards (implementation of Euratom and IAEA safeguards, research and development, analyses, remote data transmission, etc.).

Published on 25 May 2024

While CTE members have always contributed to the work of ESARDA since its creation, it was at the Steering Committee of the association held on 14 May 2018 in Luxembourg that the CTE successfully applied to become a party to the ESARDA agreement. With the administrative procedures completed, the CTE officially became a member of ESARDA on 2 October 2018.

Involved in the work of ESARDA since its creation, the CTE is now the vice-chair of the working group on the implementation of safeguards.

The Reflection Group (RG 2019), set up in 2017 on the directions of the association's work, met one last time in January 2019 (in Ispra, Italy). It then drafted its report which presents ten sets of actions aimed at three objectives:

► Establish ESARDA's short-term priorities (2019 to 2024) and prepare a roadmap;

► Define ESARDA's future medium-term activities (2019-2029) based on the new European and international landscape - to be revised before 2025 to establish the next 5-year plan;

► Review the organisation of ESARDA, and discuss how ESARDA can achieve the identified objectives and implement the defined roadmap.

Joint ESARDA - INMM meetings

For the first time in 2021, the two professional associations working in particular on safeguards, ESARDA (European Safeguards Research and Development Association) and INMM (Institute of Nuclear Materials Management), organised their annual meetings jointly. Initially scheduled to take place in Vienna to allow for a meeting of experts involved in safeguards, the meeting was exceptionally held by video conference due to health constraints related to Covid-19.

With over 1 100 participants, this joint event with INMM was a great success and an excellent opportunity to present and promote ESARDA worldwide.

All articles written for this meeting can be found here.

Based on this success, a new edition of this meeting is organised from 22 to 26 May 2023 in Vienna.

Annual joint INMM and ESARDA meeting banner. ©ESARDA INMM

Papers and presentations are available here.

It was also an opportunity to organize a joint meeting between the technical working groups of the two associations involved in safeguards: ESARDA Implementation of Safeguards WG and INMM International Safeguards Technical Division.

Implementation of Safeguards Working Group

Among the association's working groups, the IS (Implementation of Safeguards) Working Group aims to provide the safeguards community with proposals and expert advice on the implementation of safeguards concepts, methods and approaches to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of safeguards at all levels and to serve as a forum for the exchange of information and experience on safeguards implementation.

The CTE has traditionally been very active in this working group and M. Calvez has been the vice-chair since the beginning of 2022.

In conjunction with IRSN, its technical support, the CTE has completed several years of work on the management of interfaces between the three areas of safety, security and safeguards (safety, security, safeguards or "3S"). The summary of the work was published in the December 2022 ESARDA magazine (CONNECTOR N. 7).

France also proposed a questionnaire on national safeguards inspection regimes. More than ten responses were received and analysed by the CTE with the support of IRSN, providing a general overview of the different inspection regimes in place and the trends in the different safeguards inspection regimes. The final analysis resulted in a paper that was published in the proceedings of the joint ESARDA-INMM meeting in 2021 and was the subject of an oral presentation at that meeting, in a session on the subject of inspections, moderated by the CTE. Finally, four technical articles were published in ESARDA's May 2023 issue (CONNECTOR N. 8).

Similar work based on a questionnaire proposed by Finland has been looking at safeguards by design and the summary will be published shortly.