Tomographic Techniques for Safeguards Measurements of Nuclear Fuel Assemblies

Nuclear power is currently experiencing increased interest over the world. New nuclear reactors are being built and techniques for taking care of the nuclear waste are being developed. This development puts new demands and standards to safeguards, i.e. the international efforts for ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. New measuring techniques and devices are continuously being developed for enhancing the ability to detect diversion of fissile material. In this thesis, tomographic techniques for application in safeguards are presented. Tomographic techniques can non-destructively provide information of the inner parts of an object and may thus be used to control that no material is missing from a nuclear fuel assembly. When using the tomographic technique described in this thesis, the radiation field around a fuel assembly is first recorded. In a second step, the internal source distribution is mathematically reconstructed based on the recorded data. In this work, a procedure for tomographic safeguards measurements is suggested and the design of a tomographic measuring device is presented. Two reconstruction algorithms have been specially developed and evaluated for the application on nuclear fuel; one algorithm for image reconstruction and one for reconstructing conclusive data on the individual fuel rod level. The combined use of the two algorithms is suggested. The applicability for detecting individual removed or replaced rods has been demonstrated, based on experimental data