An Intentional Nuclear Forensics Approach to Support Nuclear Security

Nuclear security aims to prevent, detect, and respond to malicious acts involving nuclear material.Nuclear forensics is a key element of nuclear security and traditionally has leveraged known relationships between material characteristics and process history to establish material provenance.A major goal in recent years has been to increase the confidence in nuclear forensics signatures in order to better understand the influence of process history on sample characteristics.Intentional Forensics is the deliberate introduction of benign and persistent material signatures into nuclear fuel fabrication and processing.Its purpose is to reduce the lag time between the recovery of a material outside of regulatory control and the identification of its original provenance.An integrated, multi-laboratory project is developing a scientific and technical basis that would enable adoption of this forward-looking approach to nuclear forensics.Research is focused on optimizing approaches for intentionally tagging various nuclear materials, designing taggants that provide the desired nuclear forensics outcomes while also remaining benign during reactor irradiation, and recovering taggant signatures rapidly with high confidence.Since the project was initiated, significant progress has been made in several areas, including nuclear data development; taggant formulation, synthesis, and incorporation; modeling of taggant behaviour; and even irradiation of tagged MiniFuels fuels in the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.As our collaborative work on Intentional Forensics has progressed, several candidate taggants have stood out as especially promising (Ni, Ti), while others have proven to be more challenging to use in this context (W, Mo).The paper will give an overview of our multi-lab work that evaluates the probative value, manufacturability, reactor safety, and persistence within the fuel cycle of various taggants.