NTI

APLN member Trevor Findlay, Principal Fellow at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, spoke with NTI’s Logan Mintz about the role of safeguards in nuclear energy expansion, drawing on ideas from a paper he published with NTI in June 2025.

Logan Mintz: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) plays a key role in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons by safeguarding the peaceful use of nuclear technologies around the world. But how could a growing nuclear energy industry test the IAEA’s ability to effectively verify that countries are only using their nuclear materials and facilities for good?

Trevor Findlay: The increase in sheer volume of nuclear material and facilities will strain the IAEA’s budget for monitoring and verification. But I think more importantly, there will be a range of new reactor and fuel cycle technologies that the IAEA will need to develop inspection and accounting approaches for. And this goes for small modular reactors as well as large reactors with advanced technologies.

LM: Under these circumstances, what resources do you think the IAEA would need to fulfill its worldwide safeguards mission and where could these resources come from?

TF: The demands will be significant. It’s unlikely that there will be a huge increase in the IAEA budget; in fact, the picture may get even worse if the United States, which has long been one of the most generous supporters of the IAEA, curtails its high level of support. So, the agency needs to be more creative in supplementing its funding.

One option would be for the states looking at nuclear energy for the first time—so-called “embarking” states—to contribute to a fund that helps the IAEA cover their new safeguards requirements. It’s in the interest of those embarking countries that the IAEA is capable of affirming their new nuclear plants are not contributing to nuclear weapons proliferation. Additional resources should also come from Russia and China, which are building large numbers of nuclear reactors for themselves and exporting some as well.

LM: Your idea about an embarking states fund is an intriguing concept. In addition to these financial resources, how will the changing nuclear energy landscape affect the way member states support the IAEA with human resources?

TF: Member states provide personnel who are vital to the execution of the IAEA’s mission but the IAEA needs its own staff, too. The expansion of the nuclear industry would place a high demand on the nuclear workforce, drawing talent away from the IAEA. We can only hope that there will continue to be dedicated civil servants to carry out the agency’s mission.

LM: In addition to the quantitative growth in the nuclear industry, I’m also interested in what qualitative growth you see, like more advanced reactors and fuel designs. What, if any, challenges do you think these technologies pose for safeguards?

TF: These pose quite significant challenges for the IAEA, which has traditionally safeguarded reactors in which the fuel is stationary. In some of these new reactor designs, the fuel moves around. The IAEA will need to prepare for new technologies like that with new accounting methods. Another challenge is that some reactors will be smaller and produced in multiple units that are spread out in various locations, some quite remote.

The agency will need help from member states, including the United States, to devise safeguards approaches for new reactors from the very beginning of their lifecycle. Incorporating safeguards in the early phases of design is much more efficient than adding them on at the end.

LM: As you mentioned, some advanced reactor designs rely on sensitive fuel cycle technologies, in part because of the need for nuclear materials that are enriched to a higher degree. If global demand for enrichment and reprocessing grows, how would that affect the IAEA’s ability to safeguard nuclear energy? Would concentrating these sensitive technologies in countries that legally have nuclear weapons make oversight easier than if they were spread throughout the world?

TF: It is much better to keep enrichment and reprocessing facilities concentrated in nuclear-weapon states because of the risk of proliferation in non–nuclear-weapon states. The barriers to entry for countries that are not already enriching or reprocessing are very high; building a new fuel cycle from scratch is enormously expensive and technically difficult. Countries with existing enrichment infrastructure can add capacity relatively quickly, so that is where we are more likely to see growth.

Something else worth considering is that we could see an expansion of very small reactors and their bulk manufacturing plants across the globe. This would be a new scenario where the fuel could be put into the reactor vessel before it is moved out of the factory. It means we’ll need more safeguards on the manufacturing side, when the nuclear material arrives at the factory, when it is inserted into the reactor, and when it is transported to its destination. Inspectors may not be available to accompany each shipment, so the IAEA may have to deploy some new technology that accounts for this material in transit.

LM: Good news, in terms of not proliferating those sensitive fuel cycle technologies.We’ve already covered a wide span of topics, but is there anything else you’d like to add?

TF: I’ll end by saying that the IAEA has long been underfunded in the safeguards arena. Increasing support for the agency is quite the bargain when you think about how cost-effective safeguards are compared to major weapons systems or other forms of preventing conflict. The IAEA deserves international support.

LM: It sounds like the IAEA will be more important than ever in ensuring that civilian nuclear material and facilities are used exclusively for peaceful purposes. For that reason, we really appreciate the paper that that you wrote on this topic and value the insights you shared with us today.

Read the original article here.