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An improved methodology for numerical forensics analysis of spent reactor fuel

Sternat, Matthew R.

An improved system was developed to recover the initial parameters and operating conditions from spent nuclear fuel. This work is an expansion of a previous proof-of-concept system developed by the author. The improved system increases the fidelity of the forward model within the spent fuel forensic inverse analysis using two unique methodologies. The first improvement consists of developing a system to accurately create one-group neutron crosssection libraries for any user-specified reactor system. As such, a detailed model using the depletion code MONTEBURNS is developed. During MONTEBURNS execution, cross-section libraries are generated at every user specified burnup step in time. These libraries could be developed for many reactor systems, then housed in a database and used for analyzing spent fuel.