Year
2011
Abstract
The pyro-chemical processing (Pyroprocessing) was originated to produce plutonium that is inherently comingled with minor actinides, uranium, and fission products and has been studied to recover the actinide elements from spent nuclear fuel. From the perspective of safeguards, the safeguards experiences have not been made internationally and the safeguards approach for pryoprocessing facilities is also very challengeable. The safeguards have primarily depended on nuclear material accountancy with the measurement uncertainties inherent in the nuclear material flow. To address the weakness of nuclear material accountancy, the quantity of material unaccounted for (MUF) is generally regarded as an important measure of the safeguardablility of a facility. The observed MUF is statistically a random variable that is an estimate of the true MUF because the observed MUF is affected by errors of measurement. The uncertainty of MUF can be calculated by properly combining the effects, which are referred to as the random error and the systematic error on the nuclear material accounting measurement. Therefore, a conceptual design proposed to estimate the uncertainty of MUF for the safeguards approaches of the reference engineering-scale pyroprocessing facility (REPF) has been developed, where REPF means a model to optimize the safeguardability of a future pyroprocessing facility.