Exploring Data-Science Approaches to Assessing the Quality of ORIGEN Libraries Generated by OLM for the Safeguards Community

Year
2024
Author(s)
Christopher L. Magone - School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Oregon State University
Camille Palmer - School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Oregon State University
Todd S. Palmer - School of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Oregon State University
William A. Wieselquist - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Abstract

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been engaged in a project funded by the NNSA Office of International Nuclear Safeguards- Safeguards Technology Development to expand coverage and significantly enhance both the ease-of-use and ease-ofgeneration for the ORIGEN reactor libraries used in nuclear fuel cycle modeling. New libraries and user-friendly interfacing utilities have been created to allow IAEA staff and other users to achieve their technical goals through a more efficient workflow and faster turnaround than current state-of-practice. The project involves the further development and use of the ORIGEN Library Manager (olm), user-friendly Python-based command line utility for ORIGEN library generation, evaluation, and distribution. In this paper, we describe our initial efforts to develop new computationally eff icient approaches for the automated assessment of the libraries generated by olm. It is important to ensure that ORIGEN libraries can be used with high confidence in downstream codes, and that the interpolated state accurately reproduces inventory results that would be calculated by the reactor physics code SCALE/TRITON. For typical safeguards applications, computational efficiency is key to quickly identify disagreements between declarations and observations during inspection. We describe our first attempts to evaluate the change in library quality when portions of the library data are excluded in the interpolation, specifically for reactor assemblies fueled with uranium dioxide (UOX). Our ultimate goal is to demonstrate automated library quality assessment so that ORIGEN can be confidently and easily used by non-SCALE experts for fuel cycle calculations.