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- White, Timothy A., et al.
(author)
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Passive Tomography for Spent Fuel Verification: Analysis Framework and Instrument Design Study
- 2015
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The potential for gamma emission tomography (GET) to detect partial defects within a spent nuclearfuel assembly is being assessed through a collaboration of Support Programs to the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In the first phase of this study, two safeguards verification objectiveshave been identified. The first is the independent determination of the number of active pins that arepresent in the assembly, in the absence of a priori information. The second objective is to providequantitative measures of pin-by-pin properties, e.g. activity of key isotopes or pin attributes such ascooling time and relative burnup, for the detection of anomalies and/or verification of operator-declareddata. The efficacy of GET to meet these two verification objectives will be evaluated across a range offuel types, burnups, and cooling times, and with a target interrogation time of less than 60 minutes.The evaluation of GET viability for safeguards applications is founded on a modelling and analysisframework applied to existing and emerging GET instrument designs. Monte Carlo models of differentfuel types are used to produce simulated tomographer responses to large populations of “virtual” fuelassemblies. Instrument response data are processed by a variety of tomographic-reconstruction andimage-processing methods, and scoring metrics specific to each of the verification objectives aredefined and used to evaluate the performance of the methods. This paper will provide a description ofthe analysis framework and evaluation metrics, example performance-prediction results, and describethe design of a “universal” GET instrument intended to support the full range of verification scenariosenvisioned by the IAEA.
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