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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.
Y. Danon, R. C. Block, M. J. Rapp, F. J. Saglime, G. Leinweber, D. P. Barry, N. J. Drindak, J. G. Hoole
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 161 | Number 3 | March 2009 | Pages 321-330
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE161-321
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents new measurements of the carbon and beryllium neutron total cross section in the energy range of 24 to 950 keV. The measurements were done using a pulsed neutron source driven by an electron LINAC. The neutron beam passed through a 30-cm-thick iron filter, which results in neutron transmission only in energies where resonance scattering and potential interference exist. The neutron filter removes most of the neutrons at other energies and significantly attenuates the gamma background resulting in 20 energy windows and a high signal-to-background ratio. The filtered beam was used for transmission measurements through graphite that results in ~1% accurate total cross sections that are in excellent agreement with current evaluations. The carbon measurement provides a verification of the accuracy of the filtered beam method. Measurements of three samples of different thicknesses of beryllium resulted in accurate total cross-section values that agree with one previous measurement and show discrepancies from current evaluations. The high accuracy of the new measurements can be used for improvement of future total cross-section evaluations of beryllium.