Determining Spent Nuclear Fuel’s Plutonium Content, Initial Enrichment, Burnup, and Cooling Time

The Next Generation of Safeguards Initiative is examining nondestructive assay techniques to determine the total plutonium content in spent nuclear fuel. The goal of this research was to develop new techniques that can independently verify the plutonium content in a spent fuel assembly without relying on an operator’s declarations. Fundamentally this analysis sought to answer the following questions: (1) do spent fuel assemblies contain unique, identifiable isotopic characteristics as a function of their burnup, cooling time, and initial enrichment; (2) how much variation can be seen in spent fuel isotopics from similar and dissimilar reactor power operations; and (3) what isotopes (if any) could be used to determine burnup, cooling time, and initial enrichment? To answer these questions, 96,000 ORIGEN cases were run that simulated typical two-cycle operations with burnups ranging from 21,900 to 72,000 MWd/MTU, cooling times from 5 to 25 years, and initial enrichments between 3.5 and 5.0 weight percent. A relative error coefficient was determined to show how numerically close a reference solution has to be to another solution for the two results to be indistinguishable. By looking at the indistinguishable solutions, it can be shown how a precise measurement of spent fuel isotopics can be inconclusive when used in the absence of an operator’s declarations. Using this Method of Indistinguishable Solutions (MIS), we evaluated a prominent method of nondestructive analysis--gamma spectroscopy. From this analysis, a new approach is proposed that demonstrates great independent forensic examination potential for spent nuclear fuel by examining both the neutron emissions of Cm- 244 and the gamma emissions of Cs-134 and Eu-154