The IAEA considers a State’s entire fuel cycle capability when evaluating and implementing safeguards, a process known as the State-Level Approach. Conducting Acquisition Path Analysis (APA) is one aspect of ensuring efficient use of safeguards resources and an objective evaluation of member States. APA is designed to identify, characterize, and rank technically-feasible pathways through a fuel cycle to produce weapons-usable material. This paper covers the integration of APA techniques into the Cyclus fuel cycle simulator. Material flowing through a nuclear fuel cycle can be represented by a directed graph (digraph) with vertices V(D) representing facilities and edges E(D) representing trade or material transport. In a Cyclus input file, a user defines a set of facility prototypes and the commodities that can be traded between them. From this user-specified fuel cycle, a digraph is generated representing all possible commodity trades between facilities. Graph traversal techniques are used to enumerate all pathways for material to flow through the given fuel cycle. Pathways that produce weapons-usable material are filtered and further analyzed. Due to the flexibility of the Cyclus fuel cycle simulator, this method works for any fuel cycle, including ones that use closed facility models that are not part of the open source Cyclus and Cycamore facility libraries.
Year
2020
Abstract