Abstract
The feasibility of identifying spent nuclear fuel arising from an unknown fuel cycle in terms of reactor type and burnup using a database of nuclide composition vectors generated for combinations of these two variables is examined. The database and test cases were generated using ORIGEN-ARP, and the concentrations of 200 nuclides were analyzed for each sample. Nearest neighbors and ridge regression techniques were used to make predictions of the reactor type and burnup of test cases. Various truncated nuclide lists were also tested. An initial examination of the techniques’ sensitivity to measurement error was made by perturbing the unknowns’ composition vector and examining the effect on each of the technique’s predictions. We demonstrate through the results of these experiments that investigation and development of multivariate data analysis methodologies for nuclear forensics applications is warranted.
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Acknowledgments
This research was performed under the Nuclear Forensics Graduate Fellowship Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Part of this work was completed under DTRA contract HDTRA1-08-1-0032.
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Dayman, K., Biegalski, S. Feasibility of fuel cycle characterization using multiple nuclide signatures. J Radioanal Nucl Chem 296, 195–201 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-012-1987-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-012-1987-4