STATISTICAL INVESTIGATION OF SAMPLE CHARACTERISTICS NEEDED FORESTABLISHING THE ORIGIN OF URANIUM ORE CONCENTRATES/YELLOWCAKE

摘要

During the past few years, the need to link uranium ore (yellowcake) to a particular geologic/geographical location has become a critical issue to identifying proliferant networks. The uranium isotopics and certain stable isotopics, along with trace elemental concentrations, provide important information for making worthwhile statistical assessments of similar origins of yellowcake samples. Statistical review of chemical composition data was based on both cluster methods and principal component analysis. A comparison of sample grouping results obtained by both statistical techniques is presented for a series of yellowcake samples from reportedly three different routes of receipt.