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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
Mathew W. Swinney, Charles M. Folden III, Ronald J. Ellis, Sunil S. Chirayath
Nuclear Technology | Volume 197 | Number 1 | January 2017 | Pages 1-11
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NT16-76
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A terrorist attack using an improvised nuclear device is one of the most serious dangers facing the United States. The work presented here is part of an effort to improve nuclear deterrence by developing a methodology to attribute weapons-grade plutonium to a source reactor by measuring the intrinsic physical characteristics of the interdicted plutonium. In order to demonstrate the developed methodology, plutonium samples were produced from depleted uranium dioxide (DUO2) surrogates irradiated in a fast-neutron environment. In order to replicate the neutron flux in a fast-neutron-spectrum reactor and obtain experimental samples emulating weapons-grade plutonium produced in the blanket of a fast breeder reactor, DUO2 samples were placed in a gadolinium sheath and irradiated in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Previous computational work on this topic identified several fission products that could be used to distinguish between reactor types (fast and thermal reactors), specifically: 137Cs, 134Cs, 154Eu, 125Sb, 144Ce, 85Rb, 147Pm, and 150Sm along with the plutonium isotopes. Simulations of the fast neutron irradiation of the DUO2 fuel surrogates in the HFIR were carried out using the Monte Carlo radiation transport code MCNPX 2.7. Comparisons of the predicted values of plutonium and fission product concentrations to destructive and nondestructive assay measurements of neutron-irradiated DUO2 surrogates are presented here. The agreement between the predictions and gamma spectroscopic measurements in general were within 10% for 134Cs, 137Cs, 154Eu, and 144Ce. Additional experimental results (mass spectroscopy) agreed to within 5% for the following isotopes: 85Rb, 147Pm, 150Sm, 154Eu, 148Nd, 144Ce, and 239Pu. Two indicator isotopes previously suggested to differentiate between the reactor types were ruled out for use in the attribution methodology; 125Sb was ruled out due to the difficulty in accurately predicting its concentration, and 242Pu was ruled out because of its low content in weapons-grade plutonium.