The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Nuclear Forensics (NA-83) has established the National Nuclear Materials Archive (NNMA) to collect, characterize, and preserve nuclear material samples to support assessment of whether materials found outside of regulatory control originate from the Department of Energy. The NNMA’s function is to support attribution of a nuclear attack, predetonation events, and materials discovered outside of regulatory control. The NNMA’s purpose is to preserve physical specimens that are exemplar representations traceable to a particular time and production site in the nuclear fuel cycle. The identification and selection process for archived material is guided by NA-83 strategy documents. Subject matter experts in both the nuclear material inventories and nuclear material production histories work to evaluate and document material to meet archive requirements. Documentation efforts for consideration for the achieve involve compilation of a nuclear materials item’s known pedigree and characteristics that prove the value for nuclear forensics. A key step in the identification and selection process is to determine if a specimen is representative of material produced at a particular time and production site and would therefore exhibit unique forensic characteristics. This paper describes the approach taken by the NNMA to identify production characteristics and timelines that would indicate that an item is a product of a nuclear material processing step of interest and likely carries key characteristics of that processing step.
Year
2022
Abstract