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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 3: Fissile Materials and Detection

AGA 3.1: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 17. März 2022, 14:00–14:45, AGA-H19

What does archaeology have to do with nuclear disarmament, and why is this something for physicists? — •Malte Göttsche — RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

Archaeologists use the remains of the past to solve puzzles of history. This involves surveying, excavation and eventually the analysis of the collected data. In a sense, all of this will be required to gain confidence in a nuclear weapon state's disarmament process: A nuclear archaeology toolbox is needed to reconstruct past nuclear programs. In particular knowledge of past fissile material production is crucial to assess today's inventories. Such reconstruction could include the collection of information from open sources or provided documentation (``surveying"). Measurements of samples from shut-down nuclear facilities and of the waste they produced can provide a signature of their past operations (``excavation"). Lastly, all information will need to be analyzed, for instance to assess whether it paints a consistent picture. This talk will highlight several technical opportunities in this context, including: what and how one can learn from measuring certain isotopic ratios in structural elements of reactor cores, or the isotopic composition of waste from reprocessing where the weapons-usable plutonium is separated from fuel after its irradiation in a reactor. A statistical approach based on Bayesian inference is presented as integrated analysis tool which can jointly take into account both information from acquired data/documentation and the measurements. Lastly, we will look at how nuclear archaeology could be applied in practice, for example to assess the North Korean nuclear program.