American Academic Scientific Research Journal for Engineering, Technology, and Sciences
Abstract
Nuclear material verification for safeguards purposes is an activity carried out to confirm that the amount of nuclear material (NM) present at a given time within a certain place is in agreement with the operator declarations. Nuclear materials are usually measured using gamma-ray spectrometer in order to quantify certain isotopes. Different codes have been used to quantify the isotopic abundance in nuclear material samples. This study is investigating the performance of the Multi Group Analysis (MGA), the Multi Group Analysis for Uranium (MGAU) and the Full Range Analysis (PC/FRAM) at different energy resolution of the counting systems and different uranium isotopic compositions. The normalized measured/certified values (M/C) were used to monitor the performance of each code. The performance of the three codes showed proportional relation to measured enrichments. PC/FRAM analysis provided the best consistency along the studied resolution and enrichment ranges with normalized measured/certified values ranging from 0 to 7%. MGAU and MGA showed more sensitivity towards low resolution detectors especially at lower enrichments with normalized measured/certified values ranged from 0 to 30 % and 0 to 20 % respectively
