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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
J. Guasp, F. Castejón, I. Pastor, R. F. Álvarez-Estrada
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 72 | Number 2 | August 2017 | Pages 99-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2017.1320497
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The inverse problem for Thomson scattering (TS), that is, finding the electron distribution function (EDF), not restricted to be Maxwellian or isotropic, from the observation of the scattered spectrum, is addressed. Based on previous results by the authors, a new parallel FORTRAN code, INVERT, has been developed that allows to estimate the free parameters of a wide class of distribution functions by fitting experimental or numerical (synthetic) spectra using a variant of the simplex method. The application of these techniques to the extraction of non-Maxwellian or anisotropic features in the electron distribution function is analyzed in detail. The performance of the new code on noisy synthetic spectra and its capabilities to quantitatively discriminate among several competing EDFs modeling data are discussed. The issues of uniqueness (or nonuniqueness) of the inverse problem in case of multiparameter distribution functions are discussed. In such cases, the prospects of multiple diagnostics synthesis, or having several simultaneous scattering chords to remove the ambiguity in the reconstruction of the EDF, are also discussed. Some comments on the requirements of a TS system able to detect nonthermal or anisotropic effects are also included.