Implementing The U.S. National Nuclear Material Archive (NNMA) Program At LLNL

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is one of four U.S. national laboratories providing nuclear forensic analysis of materials for the U.S. National Nuclear Materials Archive (NNMA). Over the past year, despite restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, LLNL completed its first analyses for the NNMA, while, at the same time, began developing the infrastructure and procedures to support increased analytical throughput in the coming years. In order to increase throughput, while still meeting the requirements from our other sponsors, we have been executing an aggressive plan to increase staffing, instrumentation, and facilities over the past year. The majority of candidate materials for NNMA analysis at LLNL are currently located at other sites. Consequently, our procedures must emphasize receiving only the amount of material required for analysis from the originating sites, and a robust process for receipt, analysis, and disposition. We are also addressing the need for an information management system for storing and interpreting results, as well as the quality assurance regimen necessary to provide full confidence in the analytical results. One of our key activities in 2020 was a comparison of full nuclear forensic analyses (FF) with a more restricted set of analyses, which we call “baseline characterization” (BC) analyses, with the goal of determining the cost-benefit tradeoff of reducing the number of analytes for some materials. We analyzed 4 different sets of materials for this comparison and performed 1 FF analysis and 2 BC analyses from each set.