Download or read book A Technical Review of Non destructive Assay Research for the Characterization of Spent Nuclear Fuel Assemblies Being Conducted Under the US DOE NGSI written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a growing belief that expansion of nuclear energy generation will be needed in the coming decades as part of a mixed supply chain to meet global energy demand. At stake is the health of the economic engine that delivers human prosperity. As a consequence renewed interest is being paid to the safe management of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and the plutonium it contains. In addition to being an economically valuable resource because it can be used to construct explosive devices, Pu must be placed on an inventory and handled securely. A multiinstitutional team of diverse specialists has been assembled under a project funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) to address ways to nondestructively quantify the plutonium content of spent nuclear fuel assemblies, and to also detect the potential diversion of pins from those assemblies. Studies are underway using mostly Monte Carlo tools to assess the feasibility, individual and collective performance capability of some fourteen nondestructive assay methods. Some of the methods are familiar but are being applied in a new way against a challenging target which is being represented with a higher degree of realism in simulation space than has been done before, while other methods are novel. In this work we provide a brief review of the techniques being studied and highlight the main achievements to date. We also draw attention to the deficiencies identified in for example modeling capability and available basic nuclear data. We conclude that this is an exciting time to be working in the NDA field and that much work, both fundamental and applied, remains ahead if we are to advance the state of the practice to meet the challenges posed to domestic and international safeguards by the expansion of nuclear energy together with the emergence of alternative fuel cycles.
Download or read book A Technical Review of Non Destructive Assay Research for the Characterization of SpentNuclear Fuel Assemblies Being Conducted Under the US DOE NGSI 11544 written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nuclear Physics And Gamma ray Sources For Nuclear Security And Nonproliferation Proceedings Of The International Symposium written by Takehito Hayakawa and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nuclear nonproliferation is a critical global issue. A key technological challenge to ensuring nuclear nonproliferation and security is the detection of long-lived radioisotopes and fissionable nuclides in a non-destructive manner. This technological challenge requires new methods for detecting relevant nuclides and the development of new quantum-beam sources. For example, one new method that has been proposed and studied is nuclear resonance fluorescence with energy-tunable, monochromatic gamma-rays generated by Compton scattering of laser photons with electrons.The development of new methods requires the help of researchers from a wide range of fields, such as nuclear physics, accelerator physics, laser physics, etc. Furthermore, any new method must be compatible with the requirements of administrators and nuclear-material inspectors.
Download or read book Bibliography of Non destructive Assay Methods for Nuclear Material Safeguards written by United States. Division of Nuclear Materials Security and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The State of Art of the Nondestructive Assay of Spent Nuclear Fuel Assemblies written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spent Fuel Nondestructive Assay written by and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Development of safeguards technology to increase knowledge about spent nuclear fuel assemblies using new integrated nondestructive assay (NDA) instruments.
Download or read book Nondestructive Assay Data Integration with the SKB 50 Assemblies FY16 Update written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A project to research the application of non-destructive assay (NDA) techniques for spent fuel assemblies is underway at the Central Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel (for which the Swedish acronym is Clab) in Oskarshamn, Sweden. The research goals of this project contain both safeguards and non-safeguards interests. These nondestructive assay (NDA) technologies are designed to strengthen the technical toolkit of safeguard inspectors and others to determine the following technical goals more accurately; Verify initial enrichment, burnup, and cooling time of facility declaration for spent fuel assemblies; Detect replaced or missing pins from a given spent fuel assembly to con rm its integrity; and Estimate plutonium mass and related plutonium and uranium ssile mass parameters in spent fuel assemblies. Estimate heat content, and measure reactivity (multiplication).
Download or read book Nondestructive Assay of Nuclear Fuels written by Warren J. McGonnagle and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nondestructive Assay Methods for Irradiated Nuclear Fuels written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report is a review of the status of nondestructive assay (NDA) methods used to determine burnup and fissile content of irradiated nuclear fuels. The gamma-spectroscopy method measures gamma activities of certain fission products that are proportional to the burnup. Problems associated with this method are migration of the fission products and gamma-ray attenuation through the relatively dense fuel material. The attenuation correction is complicated by generally unknown activity distributions within the assemblies. The neutron methods, which usually involve active interrogation and prompt or delayed signal counting, are designed to assay the fissile content of the spent-fuel elements. Systems to assay highly enriched spent-fuel assemblies have been tested extensively. Feasibility studies have been reported of systems to assay light-water reactor spent-fuel assemblies. The slowing-down spectrometer and neutron resonance absorption methods can distinguish between the uranium and plutonium fissile contents, but they are limited to the assay of individual rods. We have summarized the status of NDA techniques for spent-fuel assay and present some subjects in need of further investigation. Accuracy of the burnup calculations for power reactors is also reviewed.
Download or read book Nondestructive Spent Fuel Assay Using Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quantifying the isotopic composition of spent fuel is an important challenge and essential for many nuclear safeguards applications, such as independent verification of the Pu content declared by a regulated facility, shipper/receiver measurements, and quantifying isotopic input masses at a reprocessing facility. As part of the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative, NA-241 has recently funded a multilab/university collaboration to investigate a variety of nondestructive methods for determining the elemental Pu mass in spent fuel assemblies. Nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) is one of the methods being investigated. First modeling studies have been performed to investigate the feasibility of assaying a single fuel pin using a bremsstrahlung photon source. MCNPX modeling results indicate that NRF signals are significantly more intense than the background due to scattered interrogation photons even for isotopes with concentrations below 1percent. However, the studies revealed that the dominant contribution to the background is elastic scattering, which is currently not simulated by MCNPX. Critical to this effort, we have added existing NRF data to the MCNPX photonuclear data files and are now able to incorporate NRF physics into MCNPX simulations. Addition of the non-resonant elastic scattering data to MCNPX is in progress. Assaying fuel assemblies with NRF poses additional challenges: photon penetration through the assembly is small and the spent fuel radioactive decay and neutron activity lead to significantly higher backgrounds. First modeling studies to evaluate the efficacy of NRF for assaying assemblies have been initiated using the spent fuel assembly library created at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Download or read book Nondestructive Assay of Special Nuclear Material for Uranium Fuel fabrication Facilities written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A high-quality materials accounting system and effective international inspections in uranium fuel-fabrication facilities depend heavily upon accurate nondestructive assay measurements of the facilitys̀ nuclear materials. While item accounting can monitor a large portion of the facility inventory (fuel rods, assemblies, storage items), the contents of all such items and mass values for all bulk materials must be based on quantitative measurements. Weight measurements, combined with destructive analysis of process samples, can provide highly accurate quantitative information on well-characterized and uniform product materials. However, to cover the full range of process materials and to provide timely accountancy data on hard-to-measure items and rapid verification of previous measurements, radiation-based nondestructive assay (NDA) techniques play an important role. NDA for uranium fuel fabrication facilities relies on passive gamma spectroscopy for enrichment and U isotope mass values of medium-to-low-density samples and holdup deposits; it relies on active neutron techniques for U-235 mass values of high-density and heterogeneous samples. This paper will describe the basic radiation-based nondestructive assay techniques used to perform these measurements. The authors will also discuss the NDA measurement applications for international inspections of European fuel-fabrication facilities.
Download or read book Using Nuclear Resonance Fluorescence for Nondestructive Isotopic Analysis written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) has been studied as one of the nondestructive analysis (NDA) techniques currently being investigated by a multi-laboratory collaboration for the determination of Pu mass in spent fuel. In NRF measurements specific isotopes are identified by their characteristic lines in recorded gamma spectra. The concentration of an isotope in a material can be determined from measured NRF signal intensities if NRF cross sections and assay geometries are known. The potential of NRF to quantify isotopic content and Pu mass in spent fuel has been studied. The addition of NRF data to MCNPX and an improved treatment of the elastic photon scattering at backward angles has enabled us to more accurately simulate NRF measurements on spent fuel assemblies. Using assembly models from the spent fuel assembly library generated at LANL, NRF measurements are simulated to find the best measurement configurations, and to determine measurement sensitivities and times, and photon source and gamma detector requirements. A first proof-of-principal measurement on a mock-up assembly with a bremsstrahlung photon source demonstrated isotopic sensitivity to approximately 1% limited by counting statistics. Data collection rates are likely a limiting factor of NRF-based measurements of fuel assemblies but new technological advances may lead to drastic improvements.
Download or read book Neutron Resonance Transmission Analysis NRTA written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an end-of-year report for a project funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration's Office of Nuclear Safeguards (NA-241). The goal of this project is to investigate the feasibility of using Neutron Resonance Transmission Analysis (NRTA) to assay plutonium in commercial light-water-reactor spent fuel. This project is part of a larger research effort within the Next-Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) to evaluate methods for assaying plutonium in spent fuel, the Plutonium Assay Challenge. The first-year goals for this project were modest and included: 1) developing a zero-order MCNP model for the NRTA technique, simulating data results presented in the literature, 2) completing a preliminary set of studies investigating important design and performance characteristics for the NRTA measurement technique, and 3) documentation of this work in an end of the year report (this report). Research teams at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and at several universities are also working to investigate plutonium assay methods for spent-fuel safeguards. While the NRTA technique is well proven in the scientific literature for assaying individual spent fuel pins, it is a newcomer to the current NGSI efforts studying Pu assay method techniques having just started in March 2010; several analytical techniques have been under investigation within this program for two to three years or more. This report summarizes a nine month period of work.
Download or read book Precision Estimates for Tomographic Nondestructive Assay written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Requirements for effective safeguards during the transition to environmental management at nuclear material production facilities within the DOE complex are deriving improvements in the accuracy of nondestructive assay (NDA) techniques. An important aspect of the transition is the need for facilities to terminate safeguards on waste materials, thus reducing the cost for safeguards at the facility. Requirements for the termination of safeguards on candidate waste material have been established by DOE to minimize the potential for diversion or theft of nuclear material. Because heterogenous waste and residue materials are stored in large containers such as 208-L drums, conventional assay techniques such as segmented gamma scanning (SGS) that were developed to assay small samples cannot always provide accurate measurements. Consequently, facilities using the conventional NDA instrumentation may be limited in their ability to discard waste materials in compliance with DOE requirements. One technique being applied to improve the accuracy of assays of waste in large containers is computerized tomography (CT). Research on the application of CT to improve both neutron and gamma-ray assays of waste is being carried out at Los Alamos National Laboratory. For example, tomographic gamma scanning (TGS) is a single-photon emission CT technique that corrects for attenuation of gamma rays emitted from the sample using attenuation images from transmission CT.
Download or read book Nondestructive Assay Using Active and Passive Computed Tomography written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has over 600,000 transuranic (TRU) waste drums temporarily stored at nearly 40 sites within the United States. Contents of these drums must be characterized before they are transported for permanent disposal. Traditional gamma-ray methods used to characterize nuclear waste introduce errors that are related to nonuniform measurement responses associated with unknown radioactive source and matrix material distributions. These errors can be reduced by application of tomographic techniques, that measure these distributions. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has developed two tomographic-based waste assay systems. They use external radioactive sources and tomography-protocol to map the attenuation within a waste drum as a function of mono-energetic gamma-ray energy in waste containers. Passive tomography is used to localize and identify specific radioactive waste contents within the same waste containers. Reconstruction of the passive data via the active images allows internal waste radioactivities in a drum to be corrected for any overlying heterogeneous materials, thus yielding an absolute assay of the waste radioactivities. Calibration of both systems requires only point source measurements and are independent of matrix materials. The first system is housed at LLNL and was developed to study and validate research concepts. The second system is being developed with Bioimaging Research, Inc. (BIR) and is housed within a mobile waste characterization trailer. This system has traveled to three DOE facilities to demonstrate the active and passive computed tomography capability. Both systems have participated in and successfully passed the requirements of formal DOE-sponsored intercomparison studies. The systems have measured approximately 1 to 100 grains of plutonium within a variety of waste matrix materials. Laboratory and field results from these two systems over the past several years show that both systems are capable of a precision of 1 to 4% and an accuracy of better than 30% of the true values of known standards for all drums measured.
Download or read book Evaluation of Differential Die Away Technique Potential in Context of Non Destructive Assay of Spent Nuclear Fuel written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Proceedings for the Nondestructive Assay and Nondestructive Examination Waste Characterization Conference written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report contains paper presented at the 5th Nondestructive Assay and nondestructive Examination Waste Characterization conference. Topics included compliance, neutron NDA techniques, gamma NDA techniques, tomographic methods, and NDA modality and information combination techniques. Individual reports have been processed separately for the United States Department of Energy databases.
