Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Towards inferring reactor operations from high-level waste

  • Benjamin Jung (Nuclear Verification and Disarmament, RWTH Aachen University) ;
  • Antonio Figueroa (Nuclear Verification and Disarmament, RWTH Aachen University) ;
  • Malte Gottsche (Nuclear Verification and Disarmament, RWTH Aachen University)
  • Received : 2023.11.02
  • Accepted : 2024.02.16
  • Published : 2024.07.25
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Abstract

Nuclear archaeology research provides scientific methods to reconstruct the operating histories of fissile material production facilities to account for past fissile material production. While it has typically focused on analyzing material in permanent reactor structures, spent fuel or high-level waste also hold information about the reactor operation. In this computational study, we explore a Bayesian inference framework for reconstructing the operational history from measurements of isotope ratios from a sample of nuclear waste. We investigate two different inference models. The first model discriminates between three potential reactors of origin (Magnox, PWR, and PHWR) while simultaneously reconstructing the fuel burnup, time since irradiation, initial enrichment, and average power density. The second model reconstructs the fuel burnup and time since irradiation of two batches of waste in a mixed sample. Each of the models is applied to a set of simulated test data, and the performance is evaluated by comparing the highest posterior density regions to the corresponding parameter values of the test dataset. Both models perform well on the simulated test cases, which highlights the potential of the Bayesian inference framework and opens up avenues for further investigation.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding provided by a Freigeist Fellowship grant of the VolkswagenStiftung. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the computing time provided to them at the NHR Center NHR4CES at RWTH Aachen University (project number p0020230). This is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the state governments participating on the basis of the resolutions of the GWK for national high performance computing at universities (www.nhr-verein.de/unsere-partner).

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