Rostock 2019 – scientific programme

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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 5: Nuclear Archeology and Fissile Materials

AGA 5.1: Talk

Friday, March 15, 2019, 10:30–11:00, U HS 3 Parkstr. 6

Nuclear Archaeology: Reconstructing Reactor Histories From Reprocessing Waste — •Antonio Figueroa and Malte Göttsche — Nuclear Disarmament and Verification Group, RWTH Aachen - Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science (AICES) , Aachen, Germany

Nuclear Archaeology is a field dedicated to the reconstruction and quantification of the past production of weapons-usable fissile materials. As part of related research efforts, we examine the possibilities and limitations of exploiting measurements of high level waste to deduce parameters related to the operational history of reactors such as burnup. For the first stage of this project, we use high fidelity forward calculations to estimate spent fuel compositions, and develop a surrogate model which can be used as a computationally less expensive way to map combinations of input parameters to fuel compositions. This model will help better understand the challenges when solving the inverse problem of deducing the reactor history from waste. A promising method to solve the inverse problem may be Bayesian Inference, where prior existing information (e.g. a declaration by a state) can be taken into account, and waste measurements would be used to update this knowledge. This way, measurements may confirm the existing information, make it more accurate, or identifiy inconsistencies which may indicate cheating.