ACHIEVEMENTS ON NONDESTRUCTIVE ASSAY ISOTOPIC ENRICHMENT MEASUREMENT UNDER THE U.S. DOE/NNSA-ABACC SAFEGUARDS COOPERATION AGREEMENT

The United States Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) and the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) agreed to cooperate on the testing and evaluation of special nuclear material isotopic measurement software. The project is significant because it provides a regional forum for technical experts to evaluate and standardize isotopic enrichment measurement software used to verify operator declarations for enriched uranium. The project was initiated by establishing an Isotopics Measurements Working Group (IMWG). The goal of the group is to test existing software packages and to provide guidance for standardizing and upgrading the software to broaden the applicability, improve the data quality, and ensure that software quality assurance objectives are being met. Since the time the group was started in 2006, IMWG members have collected over 7500 uranium spectra using defined hardware systems and experimental environment. Collected data have been analyzed with software packages that use enrichment meter, peak fitting, and peak ratio methods for uranium enrichment analysis. This paper describes the results obtained by the IMWG and provides details on the methods and procedures used for testing and evaluating the performance of the various software packages. Recommendations for standardization and improvements of analysis methods and algorithms are provided.