Validation and demonstration of the AEFC as a practical safeguards tool for inventory verification

TL;DR

This paper validates the AEFC nondestructive assay instrument for nuclear safeguards by demonstrating its ability to accurately estimate residual fissile material in irradiated fuel assemblies through extensive measurements at IRR-1, confirming its practicality.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale validation of the AEFC's calibration curves for residual fissile mass estimation in a real reactor environment.

Findings

AEFC can estimate U-235 mass with 1%-5% uncertainty.

The campaign measured 35 fuel assemblies in nine days.

The instrument performs well even with short cooling times.

Abstract

The Advanced Experimental Fuel Counter (AEFC) is a nondestructive assay (NDA) instrument designed to determine the residual fissile mass in irradiated fuel assemblies for safeguards verification purposes. This is done by actively interrogating an assembly with a neutron source and measuring the total (Singles) and correlated (Doubles) neutron count rates resulting from induced fissions in the irradiated nuclear fuel and relating those rates to the residual fissile mass using calibration curves. Comprehensive NDA measurements of the irradiated fuel inventory at Israeli Research Reactor 1 (IRR-1) were taken with the AEFC to validate a set of previously developed calibration curves. During the campaign, measurements were acquired of 32 standard fuel assemblies and three control assemblies in just nine days. This is a significant majority of the research reactor's irradiated fuel inventory and the largest data set gathered by the AEFC to date. Many of the fuel assemblies measured during the campaign had much shorter cooling times than those assemblies previously measured with the instrument. Calibration curves developed from previous AEFC deployments were used to determine the residual U-235 mass in the measured standard fuel assemblies. The results of the campaign demonstrated that the AEFC can be used to estimate the U-235 mass remaining in a large number of irradiated fuel assemblies with 1%-5% uncertainty in a reasonable amount of time despite operating in a high dose environment.