Dynamic analysis environment for nuclear forensic analyses

Journal Article · Wed Oct 05 00:00:00 EDT 2016 · Computer Physics Communications

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2016.09.019· OSTI ID:1355346

Stork, C. L. ^[1]; Ummel, C. C. ^[2]; Stuart, D. S. ^[1]; Bodily, S. ^[1]; Goldblum, B. L.  ^[2]

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1. Sandia National Laboratory (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
2. University of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)

We report a Dynamic Analysis Environment (DAE) software package is introduced to facilitate group inclusion/exclusion method testing, evaluation and comparison for pre-detonation nuclear forensics applications. Employing DAE, the multivariate signatures of a questioned material can be compared to the signatures for different, known groups, enabling the linking of the questioned material to its potential process, location, or fabrication facility. Advantages of using DAE for group inclusion/exclusion include built-in query tools for retrieving data of interest from a database, the recording and documentation of all analysis steps, a clear visualization of the analysis steps intelligible to a non-expert, and the ability to integrate analysis tools developed in different programming languages. Two group inclusion/exclusion methods are implemented in DAE: principal component analysis, a parametric feature extraction method, and k nearest neighbors, a nonparametric pattern recognition method. Spent Fuel Isotopic Composition (SFCOMPO), an open source international database of isotopic compositions for spent nuclear fuels (SNF) from 14 reactors, is used to construct PCA and KNN models for known reactor groups, and 20 simulated SNF samples are utilized in evaluating the performance of these group inclusion/exclusion models. For all 20 simulated samples, PCA in conjunction with the Q statistic correctly excludes a large percentage of reactor groups and correctly includes the true reactor of origination. As a result, employing KNN, 14 of the 20 simulated samples are classified to their true reactor of origination.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States). Nuclear Science and Security Consortium
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• Grant/Contract Number: NA0003180; AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1355346
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1396455
• Journal Information: Computer Physics Communications, Vol. 210, Issue C; ISSN 0010-4655
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
nuclear forensics
principal component analysis
k nearest neighbors algorithm