LABORATORY DEMONSTRATION OF A MULTISENSOR UNATTENDED CYLINDER VERIFICATION STATION FOR URANIUM ENRICHMENT PLANT SAFEGUARDS

The objective of safeguards is the timely detect ion of the diversion of a significant quantity of nuclear material s , and safeguarding uranium enrichment plants is especially important in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The IAEA’s proposed Unattended Cylinder Verification Station (UCVS) for UF 6 cylinder verificati on would potentially combine the operator’s accountancy scale with a nondestructive assay system such as the Passive Neutron Enrichment Meter (PNEM) and cylinder identification and surveillance systems. In this project, we built a laboratory - scale UCVS and demonstrated its capabilities using mock UF 6 cylinders. We developed a s ignal processing algorithm to automate the data collection and processing from four continuous, unattended sensors. The laboratory demonstration of the system showed that the software could successfully identify cylinders, snip sensor data at the appropriate points in time, determine the relevant characteristics of the cylinder contents, check for consistency among sensors, and output the cylinder data to a file. This paper describes t he equipment, algorithm and software development, and results of the laboratory demonstration.