Abstract
Inverse depletion/decay methods are useful tools for application to nuclear forensics. Previously, inverse methods were applied to the generic case of predicting the burnup, initial enrichment, and cooling time for selected spent nuclear fuels based on measured actinide and fission product concentrations. These existing measurements were not developed or optimized for use by these inverse techniques, and hence previous work demonstrated the prediction of only the fuel burnup, initial enrichment, and cooling time. Previously, nine spent fuel samples from an online data compilation were randomly selected for study. This work set out to demonstrate the full prediction capabilities using measured isotopic data, but with a more deliberate selection of fuel samples. The current approach is to evaluate nuclides within the same element to see if complementary information can be obtained in addition to the reactor burnup, enrichment, and cooling. Specifically, the reactor power and the fuel irradiation time values are desired to achieve the maximum prediction capabilities of these techniques.
