Iterative Method for Determining Isotopic Composition of Nuclear Fuel Using Irradiation at Multiple Neutron Spectra

摘要

The increased availability of compact neutron generators allows for the investigation of a NDA technique that leverages the variability of microscopic cross sections of fissionable isotopes at different incident neutron energies to quantitatively estimate isotopic masses. The different fission cross sections give a unique fission rate for a specific isotopic composition and incident neutron energy. Measuring the fission rate (F) at different neutron energies leads to a system of linear equations which can be solved for the unknown masses of the fissionable materials because the total fission rate of an unknown sample is expected to be a linear combination of the isotopic (1).