Nuclear safeguards inspectors routinely rely on video surveillance in hundreds of facilities in order to maintain continuity of knowledge between on-site inspections.The video footage needs to be reviewed manually and creates significant workload for the inspectorates.
In order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the surveillance workflow, the JRC developed a 3D surveillance system, which complements traditional video cameras.
Laser Curtain for Containment and Tracking
Laser Curtain for Containment and Tracking (LCCT) is an active, continuous 3D surveillance system based on real-time laser scanners, which allows event-based monitoring of nuclear facilities. It can remotely and securely transmit event data and has the potential to significantly reduce safeguards inspection effort.
On a local server running at the facility, all laser data is fused into a single 3D dataset and analysed in real-time to monitor and track safeguards-relevant activities. Since the analysis works in a 3D space, event detection can be restricted to predefined areas of interest. Furthermore, the measurements are based on active laser light, which allows for a more robust event detection compared to the optical video surveillance. The area of interest is divided into multiple monitoring zones and any activity in the monitored zones triggers an event. The sequence of events can then be utilised to verify declared activities. When an event is detected, the LCCT records the metadata (event type, time stamp and zone ID) and saves the corresponding laser data to a file.
Featured installations
LCCT has been deployed at various nuclear facilities since 2015:
La Hague (FR): At the fuel reprocessing facility in La Hague, Euratom inspectorate is using LCCT to monitor movements of nuclear material in the spent fuel pond.
Atucha (Argentina): The IAEA is using LCCT to monitor the transfer of spent fuel from the cooling pond to the dry storage at the Atucha nuclear power plant.
Spent Fuel Storage Facilities: A field trial is running in Gundremmingen (DE), to evaluate LCCT for monitoring interim spent fuel storage facilities. After the shutdown of the last nuclear power plant in Germany in 2023, all spent fuel will be transferred to onsite dry storages where the material will remain for several decades. LCCT can significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness in safeguarding these quasi-static facilities. The deployment of LCCT in similar spent fuel storage facilities in Belgium and Slovakia is scheduled for the coming years.
Onkalo (FI): The world first final repository for spent nuclear fuel will soon go operational in Finland. LCCT is a core component of the safeguards equipment that will provide near-real time monitoring to the nuclear safeguards inspectors at Euratom and IAEA
Future objectives
Current research and development work integrates machine learning techniques to improve LCCT’s detection and classification capabilities. This will allow to further automatize data analysis and distinguish safeguards relevant and non-relevant objects or activities.