Publications

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Recent years have seen a significantly increased focus in the areas of knowledge retention and mentoring of junior staff within the U.S. national laboratory complex. In order to involve the university community in this process, as well, an international safeguards mentoring program was established by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) for early career university faculty. After a successful experience during 2019, the program continued into 2020 to include two new faculty members who were paired with SNL subject matter experts based on the topic of their individual projects: one to work on advanced laboratory work for physics, technology, and policy of nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation, and the other to look at machine learning applied to international safeguards and nonproliferation. There is a two-pronged purpose to the program: fostering the development of educational resources available for international safeguards and exploring new research topics stemming from the exchange of mentor and mentee. Further, the program as a whole allows for junior faculty members to establish and expand a relationship network within international safeguards. In addition, programs such as this build stronger connections between the academic and the national laboratory community. Thanks to the junior faculty members that now have new connections into the laboratory community and potential for collaboration projects with the laboratories in the future, safeguards knowledge can actually increase far beyond just individually engaging students using this new and efficient avenue.

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Renewed interest in the development of molten salt reactors has created the need for analytical tools that can perform safeguards assessments on these advanced reactors. This work outlines a flexible framework to perform safeguards analyses on a wide range of advanced reactor designs. The framework consists of two parts, a process model and a safeguards tool. The process model, developed in MATLAB Simulink, simulates the flow materials through a reactor facility. These models are linked to SCALE/TRITON and SCALE/ORIGEN to approximate depletion and decay of fuel salts but are flexible enough to accommodate higher fidelity tools if needed. The safeguards tool uses the process data to calculate common statistical quantities of interest such as material unaccounted for (MUF) and Page's trend test on the standardized independent transformed MUF (SITMUF). This paper documents the development of these tools.

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This work describes the ongoing work to develop a molten salt reactor (MSR) model and associated tools for safeguards analysis. A new flowsheet was developed in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for the Molten Salt Demonstration Reactor (MSDR). This design was chosen by ORNL as a generic baseline design that could be used for safeguards research. The model has simple chemical processing that is less extensive than the two-fluid flowsheet developed in the last year. A detailed TRITON reactor physics model, provided by ORNL, was implemented into the process model. The process model now includes reactor parameters such as K-eff and decay heat, which could be used as part of an advanced safeguards approach. Finally, a set of generic safeguards tools based on current safeguards approaches were developed. These tools are flexible and can be used with most MSR flowsheets. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was funded by the Materials Protection Accounting and Control Technologies (MPACT) working group as part of the Fuel Cycle Technologies Program under the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy. The authors would also like to acknowledge Ben Betz ler for his work on the reactor physics models that were incorporated into the work and the continued collaboration with ORNL staff.

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Access points at a deep, mined geological repository (GR) for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and other nuclear wastes present potential diversion paths for nuclear material. Because C/S measures are not likely to be used underground, access to a GR will require unprecedented reliance on C/S measures to maintain continuity of knowledge (CoK) on SNF buried underground. We develop a model GR based on common features of GR designs from national programs in order to develop and optimize C/S measures for GR access points that maximize confidence that CoK is maintained on SNF underground. Critical access points identified in this study are surface entrances to (1) the GR ramp (2) the excavation shaft, (3) the main elevator shaft, and (4) the ventilation shaft. The first three are considered critical detection points (DPs), whereas the fourth is considered a non-critical DP. The reason for the distinction is due to the different design capabilities of shaft components: the first three (ramp, excavation shaft, main elevator) are all capable of being used to move material from the underground to the surface, whereas the ventilation shaft is not. Such capabilities are verified during periodic design information verification (DIV) inspections.

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This work outlines the development of a two-fluid molten salt reactor process and safeguards model. The model is split into two parts consisting of a process model and a safeguards model. The process model is based on a design by Flibe Energy, the Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which is a two-fluid molten salt reactor that performs full salt processing on-site to remove fission products and re-fuel the reactor. The model simulates feed and consumption rates of the reactor fuel and blanket salts. The process model includes the reactor core and salt processing loops. The reactor core model has a robust architecture that allows for integration with other tools and data sets as they become available. A majority of the effort to date has been focused on the process model, and the safeguards model will be developed in detail in future work. A preliminary safeguards analysis was performed based on actinide inventories, and a preliminary materials accountancy approach was initialized. The results of this analysis are presented along with a description of the model development.