JAEA Development Programs of Advanced Technologies for Safeguards and Security

This paper reports the progress that has been made over the past year at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) concerning four development programs of advanced technologies for the measurement and detection of nuclear material for safeguards and security. These four programs are being coordinated through the Integrated Support Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security (ISCN), at JAEA, and the work is being conducted by several teams in JAEA and in cooperation with our partners in the United States Department of Energy (U.S. DOE) laboratories and in the Joint Research Centre’s Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (JRC-IRMM). One program is the development of a neutron detector based on a ZnS ceramic scintillator material, with the goal of replacing neutron detectors based on 3He. The other three programs are developing new non-destructive assay (NDA) systems. One system measures the nuclear resonance fluorescence (NRF) induced in fissile material by a high-intensity, mono-energetic gamma ray beam, which is produced by a Laser Compton Scattering (LCS) system in an energy-recovery linear accelerator (ERL). Another system uses a combination of neutron resonance transmission analysis (NRTA) and neutron resonance capture analysis (NRCA) to determine the fissile content in particle debris of melted nuclear fuel, such as from damaged reactors. The last system is a neutron-based, spent-fuel, NDA system that is being developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The system uses a combination of the techniques of self-interrogation neutron resonance densitometry (SINRD) and passive neutron albedo reactivity (PNAR). It will be tested on used nuclear fuel assemblies in the spent fuel pool at the site of the Fugen Advanced Thermal Reactor in Tsuruga, Japan.