Application of the DOD Method to Some Results of the IDA-80 Measurement Evaluation Program

The IDA-80 measurement evaluation program refers to the determination of uranium and plutonium concentrations in the feed of nuclear fuels reprocessing facilities using mass-spectrometric isotope dilution analysis. Guided jointly by CBNM and KfK, it was performed and evaluated between 1980 and 1984. In the evaluation performed by conventional methods, the handling of so-called outlier results had played a substantial role. This fact forced the search for alternative evaluation methods. With the DoD method such an evaluation tool was found. It uses all possible absolute differences of measurement results as the basis for statistical data treatment ('distribution of differences') and allows to derive meaningful estimates of standard deviations without the necessity to reject outli- Recently, an extended comparison of DoD evaluation results with those obtained by conventional data treatment was made for the IDA-80 measurement evaluation program. The main results are summarized in this paper.