A Viability Study of Gamma Emission Tomography for Spent Fuel Verification : JNT 1955 Phase I Technical Report

• The potential for gamma emission tomography (GET) to detect partial defects within a spent nuclear fuel assembly is being assessed through a collaboration of Support Programs to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In the first phase of this study, two safeguards verification objectives have been identified. The first is the independent determination of the number of active pins that are present in the assembly, in the absence of a priori information about the assembly. The second objective is to provide quantitative assay of pin-by-pin properties, for example the activity of key isotopes or pin attributes such as cooling time and relative burnup, under the assumption that basic fuel parameters (e.g., assembly type and nominal fuel composition) are known. The efficacy of GET to meet these two verification objectives has been evaluated across a range of fuel types, burnups, and cooling times, and with a target total interrogation time of less than 60 minutes. This evaluation of GET viability for safeguards applications was founded on a modelling and analysis framework applied to existing and emerging GET instrument designs. Monte Carlo models of different fuel types were used to produce simulated tomographer responses to large populations of “virtual” fuel assemblies. Instrument response data were processed using a variety of tomographic-reconstruction and image-processing methods, and scoring metrics specific to each of the verification objectives were used to predict performance. This report describes the analysis framework and metrics used to predict tomographer performance, the design of a “universal” GET (UGET) instrument intended to support the full range of verification scenarios envisioned by the IAEA, and a comparison of predicted performance for the notional UGET design and an optimized variant of an existing IAEA instrument.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Subatomär fysik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Subatomic Physics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Fysik med inriktning mot tillämpad kärnfysik

Physics with specialization in Applied Nuclear Physics

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