Development of Plutonium Reference Material: 10+ years of JAEA-DOE Cooperation

In the early 2000’s it had become clear to Japan’s safeguards authorities, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Japanese operators and the world’s nuclear reference material providers that Japanese fuel cycle facilities would require plutonium reference materials needed to perform a large number of accountancy measurements beyond the capacity of the producers. Additionally, the increasing difficulty in producing plutonium certified reference materials, combined with the significant difficulty and expense of shipping plutonium to Japan, would further limit the amount of imported plutonium reference materials available for safeguards. In order to help address the issue, in 2003 the US Department of Energy’s NNSA and Japan’s Japan Atomic Energy Authority (JAEA) began a cooperation to develop Japanese capabilities for plutonium reference material production. Under the auspices of the NNSA’s DOE-JAEA cooperative agreement, the DOE’s New Brunswick Laboratory and JAEA’s Plutonium Fuel Development Center (PFDC) began efforts to establish plutonium reference material production capability from source material available within Japan. In 2007 the DOE’s Savannah River National Laboratory re-established a similar cooperative agreement with JAEA’s Tokai Reprocessing Technology Development Center (TRTDC ) to develop and maintain expertise in plutonium coulometry in support of the long-term goals of DOE and JAEA. The scope of this SRNL-TRTDC agreement was expanded in 2013. This paper will discuss the development and status of these efforts and provide an overview of the challenges and coordination required to establish the capabilities for producing domestic reference materials.