Sensitivity Studies on a Novel Nuclear Forensics Methodology for Source Reactor-Type Discrimination of Separated Weapons Grade Plutonium

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A recently published nuclear forensics methodology for source discrimination of separated weaponsgradeplutonium utilizes intra-element isotope ratios and a maximum likelihood formulation to identifythe most likely source reactor-type, fuel burnup and time since irradiation of unknown material.
Sensitivity studies performed here on the effects of random measurement error and the uncertainty inintra-element isotope ratio values show that different intra-element isotope ratios have disproportionatecontributions to the determination of the reactor parameters. The methodology is robust to individualerrors in measured intra-element isotope ratio values and even more so for uniform systematic errorsdue to competing effects on the predictions from the selected intra-element isotope ratios suite. For aunique sample-model pair, simulation uncertainties of up to 28% are acceptable without impedingsuccessful source-reactor discrimination. However, for a generic sample with multiple plausible sourceswithin the reactor library, uncertainties of 7% or less may be required. The results confirm the critical roleof accurate reactor core physics, fuel burnup simulations and experimental measurements in the proposedmethodology where increased simulation uncertainty is found to significantly affect the capabilityto discriminate between the reactors in the library.

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