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Supporting Defense and Safety using Satellite Imagery

Danish Ahmad
Software System Architect
Cres-Tech Pvt. Ltd.
danish@cres-tech.com

Abstract
In the current era, proliferation of nuclear weapons poses a great threat to international peace and security. Defense is the most sensitive, critical and important issue for any regime. In these circumstances the Nuclear powers, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), United Nations have an important role to stop this massive development. I present various case studies for observation and remote monitoring of such nuclear facilities.

Discussion
To start with, any conscientious person will go for “Identification of Enrichment Plants” first. There are two reliable identification and monitoring approaches, Feature Oriented Identification of Enrichment plants and Thermal identification to ensure working of plants.

Feature Oriented Identification
With the advancement in Remote Sensing, high resolution imagery (of 1m) from Commercial satellites (like IKONOS, LANDSAT etc.) is easily available. One can easily identify the huge typical structures of a nuclear constellation like Reprocessing Plant, Gaseous Diffusion Plant and Reactors. Let’s look at there respective observable features [2]:

Nuclear Facility	Observable Features
Reactors	Have cooling towers or natural water body (with intake and discharge ports), a high narrow stack (or its shadow); a reactor building, security perimeter; rail roads; an isolated site etc.
Reprocessing plants	A very high stack (or its shadow); a long “canyon like” building; some holding ponds or reservoirs for waste or sludge; security perimeter; rail roads; an isolated site etc.
Gaseous Diffusion Plants	Large area (roof) process buildings (roof of most buildings have ventilation shaft) ; cooling towers or a nearby river or lakes; a nearby fossil fuel power plant; large electric switchyard (substation); waste management and disposal facilities; security perimeter; rail roads; an isolated site etc.

Let’s view few satellite images of important nuclear facilities of Russia, India and Pakistan. One can easily pin-point in 1m IKONOS images almost all the features mentioned above:

Fig 1. 1m resolution IKONOS satellite image (captured July 2000) of site of plutonium production reactors at Tomsk-7, Russia.
[Credit: Reference 2 and Spaceimaging.com.]

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