IMPROVEMENTS AND OPERATION OF THE OAK RIDGE MOCK FEED AND WITHDRAWAL FACILITY

摘要

The mock feed and withdrawal (F&W) facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was designed to be a test bed for safeguards applications of load cell monitoring to inspector verification of enrichment activity at gas centrifuge enrichment plants (GCEPs). Using water as the processed material in place of uranium hexafluoride, the mock F&W facility provides a cheap, versatile means to simulate monitoring of enrichment processes for 'proof of concept' purposes. The mock F&W facility processes water at a roughly 1:100 scale (in both time and mass) of a GCEP, and features three feed stations, two tail stations, and three product stations; the facility can be operated continuously by adding and removing tanks without interrupting the mock enrichment process. Since the fall of 2009, multiple improvements have been made to the mock F&W facility, including automated control of water level of the surge tank, diversion masking (spoofing), simulation of cold traps, and redesigned operating procedures to better mimic GCEP operation. Other changes, such as a reduction in load cell measurement resolution, have been implemented in response to conversations with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Many operational runs have been performed on the mock F&W facility to model various scenarios at GCEPS (e.g. diversion, undeclared feed, and masking). This paper overviews the improvements to the mock F&W facility and demonstrates the data obtained from facility operation. Where possible, data from the mock F&W facility is compared to data from real GCEP facilities to illustrate the quality of the mock facility's analog to real centrifuge enrichment processes. Visualization of the data is generated via a MATLAB™ software tool designed specifically for monitoring of the mock F&W facility.