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AGA: Arbeitsgruppe Physik und Abrüstung

AGA 4: Nuclear Archeology

AGA 4.2: Vortrag

Donnerstag, 21. März 2024, 12:15–12:45, PTB HS HvHB

Nuclear Archaeology with Reprocessing Waste: Discriminating Reactor Types — •Benjamin Jung and Malte Göttsche — Nukleare Verifikation und Abrüstung, RWTH Aachen

Sustainable nuclear disarmament requires a concept for accounting for the fissile material that would emerge from the dismantled warheads and the existing stockpiles of fissile material that are not currently under safeguards. Nuclear archaeology provides a toolkit with the potential to answer some of the questions that arise during related verification activities.

Previously, we have shown that a Bayesian inference framework can reconstruct reactor parameters such as fuel burnup and time since irradiation. Here, we present an extension of this framework to infer the source reactor type as well as several parameters of interest. This inference model discriminates between three reactor types (Magnox, PHWR, and PWR) and simultaneously reconstructs the fuel burnup, time since irradiation, initial enrichment, and average power density. We apply this model to a set of simulated test data and evaluate the performance by comparing the highest posterior density region with the ground truth. The model performs well on the test data, demonstrating that Bayesian inference can potentially extract information from samples of reprocessing waste even when the reactor of origin is unknown.

Keywords: Nuclear archaeology; Bayesian inference; fissile material; disarmament