Acoustic Monitoring of Pyroprocessing Equipment
This paper provides an introduction to using acoustic monitoring to advance detection techniques for pyroprocessing in support of nuclear safeguards and non-proliferation. The usage of free air acoustic monitoring has been previously demonstrated at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) facilities such as the Advanced Test Reactor and the National Security Test Range. However, the proposed work revolves around a new deployment environment, the Fuel Conditioning Facility, that brings forward several questions regarding the performance of the technology in non-free air media. The confinement of the pyroprocessing equipment to a heavily shielded hot cell, the atmosphere of the hot cell containing argon gas, and the radiation dose inside the hot cell are all new environments for acoustic monitoring. To our knowledge, acoustic measurements have not been completed in such an environment before. This offers a new opportunity to study not only the acoustic signatures of the equipment inside of the hot cell, but also the propagation of the signals through the hot cell and at distances away from their origination. The objective of this paper is to explain the planned instruments to monitor the Fuel Conditioning Facility in order to evaluate acoustic signals emitted from equipment during various stages of operation. Identifying these signals can potentially enable the identification of specific pieces of equipment used in pyroprocessing and produce information of their operational status. If successful, this type of monitoring could offer a new method to aid in safeguards and proliferation detection of pyroprocessing activities.
- Research Organization:
- Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- 58
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC07-05ID14517
- OSTI ID:
- 2299509
- Report Number(s):
- INL/CON-23-75130-Rev000
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Nuclear Energy Agency 16th Information Exchange Meeting on Actinide and Fission Product Partitioning and Transmutation, Paris, France, 10/24/2023 - 10/27/2023
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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