Year
2018
Abstract
The Spent Fuel Nondestructive Assay (NDA) project started in FY09 with the premise of developing NDA instruments to achieve the following technical goals: (1) verify the initial enrichment, burnup, and cooling time of facility declaration; (2) detect the diversion or replacement of pins, (3) estimate the plutonium mass, (4) estimate decay heat, and (5) determine the reactivity of spent fuel assemblies. Phase I of the project comprised primarily simulations and analysis of detector response from 14 NDA techniques using a wide range of simulated spent fuel libraries. Phase II involved prioritization for development of instruments by the down-selection of promising, near-term (5 years), deployable, integrated systems. Finally, Phase III demonstrated measurements for characterization and validation by integration of two or more complementary techniques into a few systems, and construction of a few proof-of-principle/prototype instruments. In 2013, three instruments were field tested with spent fuel assemblies in Japan and Republic of Korea respectively: the Passive Neutron Albedo Reactivity (PNAR), Californium Interrogation Prompt Neutron (CIPN), and Self-Interrogation Neutron Resonance Densitometry (SINRD) instruments. This research will discuss experience gained during the first two phases of the project and deployment of the first three instruments along with preliminary data mining results for the integrated systems.