Predicting fissile content of spent nuclear fuel assemblies with the passive neutron Albedo reactivity technique and Monte Carlo code emulation
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
There is a great need in the safeguards community to be able to nondestructively quantify the mass of plutonium of a spent nuclear fuel assembly. As part of the Next Generation of Safeguards Initiative, we are investigating several techniques, or detector systems, which, when integrated, will be capable of quantifying the plutonium mass of a spent fuel assembly without dismantling the assembly. This paper reports on the simulation of one of these techniques, the Passive Neutron Albedo Reactivity with Fission Chambers (PNAR-FC) system. The response of this system over a wide range of spent fuel assemblies with different burnup, initial enrichment, and cooling time characteristics is shown. A Monte Carlo method of using these modeled results to estimate the fissile content of a spent fuel assembly has been developed. A few numerical simulations of using this method are shown. Finally, additional developments still needed and being worked on are discussed.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1036731
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-10-06933; LA-UR-10-6933; TRN: US1201467
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering ; May 8, 2011 ; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Nondestructive determination of plutonium mass in spent fuel: prelliminary modeling results using the passive neutron Albedo reactivity technique
Non-destructive assay of spent nuclear fuel using passive neutron Albedo reactivity