THE EURATOM UNATTENDED MEASUREMENT STATION FOR FRESH FUEL ASSEMBLIES

A medium term objective of the Euratom Safeguards Directorate is to implement up to 100% verification of the output of all major LEU fabrication plants by unattended measurement. In collaboration with ESD, the JRC support program has developed an unattended measurement station (UMS) for fresh LEU assemblies. The UMS is an integration of a shift register based active neutron measurement and optical character recognition (OCR) to provide automatic identification of the assembly being measured. The paper describes the acceptance tests of the UMS using BWR fuel assemblies at the Fabbricazione Nucleare facility (Figure 1). The paper describes the test results from the standpoints of logistics of facility operations, reliability of unattended operation and performance of neutron measurement.