Abstract: |
Technical nuclear forensics is one of the tools that can be used to deter nuclear terrorism and proliferation threats. Nuclear forensics techniques developed at Texas A&M University showed that ten intra-element nuclide ratios: 137Cs/133Cs, 154Eu/153Eu, 134Cs/137Cs, 135Cs/137Cs, 136Ba/138Ba, 150Sm/149Sm, 152Sm/149Sm, 240Pu/239Pu, 241Pu/239Pu, and 242Pu/239Pu can be utilized to estimate nuclear fuel burnup, cooling time, and rector-type of irradiation for the attribution of plutonium produced. Monte Carlo N-Particle code, MCNP6.2 was used to perform the neutronics simulations, which included fuel burnup simulations to build a database containing concentration of the aforementioned nuclides of interest that can be used to identify the characteristics of irradiated fuel. The isotopic information was stored as a function of fuel burnup and time since irradiation for each reactor-type simulated. The database was point validated using experimental neutron irradiations of uranium of various enrichments in research reactors. The point validations were possible by subjecting the irradiated uranium samples to radiochemical separations and performing nondestructive and destructive assays of nuclides. Using this point validated database, we were able to predict the characteristics of unknown irradiated nuclear reactor fuel samples in two different ways; one using a maximum likelihood statistical method and another using a combination of machine learning methods. |