“The technical nuclear forensics community is dedicated to understanding where materials outside of regulatory control originated and how long they have been outside of regulatory control,” said Ashley Shields, a computational chemist in ORNL’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Division. “This information is key for law enforcement investigations.”

While the broader research venture is concerned with whether taggants can be added in a way that fuel fabricators can produce, without compromising safety or performance, the ORNL team is looking at the materials that occur early in the nuclear fuel cycle to determine when – if at all – a taggant could be added to provide a novel, measurable signature throughout the fuel cycle. 

“As part of our research, we synthesize tagged materials and analyze whether the taggant changed the original material’s properties in a way that we can clearly attribute to the presence of the tag,” said Tyler Spano, a nuclear security scientist at ORNL and the publication’s lead author. 

By studying the physiochemical behavior of the taggants and how they persist – or don’t – during relevant chemical processing, the team hopes to identify effective forensic taggant materials. The research, which was highlighted by the Nuclear Forensics International Technical Working Group as a notable publication, represents a step toward understanding the feasibility of intentional nuclear forensics and, ultimately, the ability to determine the provenance of nuclear materials found outside of regulatory control.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information visit https://energy.gov/science.

This Oak Ridge National Laboratory news article "Uranium science researchers investigate feasibility of intentional nuclear forensics" was originally found on https://www.ornl.gov/news