Abstract:
Environmental sampling analysis technology is one of the safeguards measures used by International Atomic Energy Agency to detect undeclared nuclear materials and nuclear activities. Noble gas isotope correlations technique is of great significance in nuclear safeguards supervision and monitoring of large-scale reprocessing facilities, which is far from the reprocessing process and less invasive. This study focuses on the measurement needs of spent fuel burn-up during the chopping and dissolution processes of the spent fuel, and conducted research on stable xenon isotope correlation spent fuel burn-up technique. The spent fuel of 101 Heavy Water Research Reactors and Daya Bay Pressurized Water Reactors was taken as the research object. Physical calculations of burn-up and quantity of fission products were carried out through ORIGEN2 code. Based on the nuclear safeguards supervision and verification scenario, a stable xenon isotope correlation model for quantity of fission products and spent fuel burn-up is established, and linear fitting relationships between spent fuel burn-up in 101 Heavy Water Research Reactors and Daya Bay Pressurized Water Reactors and
131Xe/
134Xe,
132Xe/
134Xe isotopes ratio are obtained. The xenon were obtained by xenon sampling from stack gases during chopping and dissolution of spent fuel through low temperature activated carbon sampling method, and the measurement of xenon isotope ratio by high resolution gas mass spectrometer measurement in the actual reprocessing process are used to calculate the burn-up. The results of 101 Heavy Water Research Reactors and Daya Bay Pressurized Water Reactors both show that the relative deviation between the spent fuel burn-up value which inferred by linear fitting based on
132Xe/
134Xe isotope ratio and the burn-up reference value is within 6% relatively, which verifies the effectiveness and practicality of the correlation model. Prospects were given for the practical application of this technology in nuclear safeguards verification and detecting.