The Expert Group started its activities in December 2002 and has held three full group meetings, has established subgroups to address specific tasks, and holds regular conference calls for coordination of activities. The Group has drawn heavily upon the report Guidelines for the Performance of Nonproliferation Assessments, recently issued by NA-241.

The Generation IV Roadmap defined the following Proliferation Resistance and Physical Protection goal for future nuclear energy systems:

Generation IV nuclear energy systems will increase the assurance that they are a very unattractive and the least desirable route for diversion or theft of weapons-usable materials, and provide increased physical protection against acts of terrorism.

The Group has issued a preliminary Metrics Report that further defines these goals for proliferation resistance (PR) and for physical protection (PP). The preliminary report identifies six high-level measures for each goal. These high-level measures represent proliferation resistance and physical protection robustness in terms of quantifiable parameters, which depend on lower level metrics representing characteristics of the materials, facilities, processes and institutional arrangements.

Each measure represents a major system characteristic that would be an important impediment to the strategy of a proliferant nation (PR) or of a subnational group attempting theft or sabotage (PP). For example, one PR measure is proliferation time, the time required to overcome the multiple barriers provided by the system to successful proliferation. An example of a PP measure is adversary delay, the time required to overcome intrinsic barriers to access and disable a vital equipment target set (radiological sabotage), or to remove materials (theft). Combined together, the complete set of measures provides information for program policy makers and system designers to compare specific system design features and integral system characteristics and to make choices among alternative options.

The Group is currently drafting a preliminary Framework Report. The framework provides the outline of the overall evaluation methodology in terms of its scope and major elements. It defines an approach for specifying the threat space the potential range of national or subnational aspirations, capabilities, and strategies that might challenge Generation IV systems to be used for PR and PP evaluation. The framework recommends and outlines a phased evaluation approach to analyzing PR and PP of system characteristics and to quantifying metrics and measures within this threat space. (Graphic below illustrates the evaluation process.) This phased evaluation approach will allow evaluations to become more detailed and more representative as system design progresses.

The development of the measures, threat space and methodology framework is a work in progress. Itis expected to evolve as a result of iterations within the Expert Group and from demonstration that the measures can be evaluated in a phased manner, with a level of effort appropriate to the system design level, and that the resulting measures provide useful and actionable information for the key Generation IV stakeholders.

An initial proposed evaluation methodology will be issued by the end of this calendar year. In subsequent years, the methodology will be tested and upgraded, and the catalog of system evaluations expanded, as the methodology is applied in Generation IV system design and evaluation activities. In particular, the main activities for the second year will be the development of a sample case and the application of the proposed methodology to the sample case.