A major concern with respect to spent fuel storage is the amount of heat that is generated by decay products. In the context of repository design and operation, it is necessary to quantify the heat load entering the repository. The research presented here describes the dominant isotopes that contribute to the decay heat and identifies which can be directly measured by means of nondestructive assay (NDA). This research quantified the fraction of the heat term that can be directly measured by NDA for a range of initial enrichments, burnup and cooling times values; this was achieved by using the isotopic inventory of the spent fuel library created by the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI). The primary motivation for this work is to determine whether NDA can provide rapid quantification of the heat term, particularly relative to calorimetric methods. These detection systems would allow for the spent fuel assemblies to remain in storage pools because the systems could either be permanently installed in the pool or manually lowered into position. This work is supported by the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative, Office of Nuclear Safeguards and Security, National Nuclear Security Administration.
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