Development Of A Topological Method For Nuclear Forensics Image Data

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) has partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration’s (DOE/NNSA) Office of Nuclear Smuggling Detection and Deterrence in the fields of safeguards, nuclear nonproliferation, and nuclear security under an agreement signed in 1988 between the U.S. and Japanese governments. Five projects have been carried out in cooperation with DOE/NNSA as part of the nuclear forensics technology development in JAEA-ISCN (Integrated Support Center for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security) since 2011. The most recent project in nuclear forensics involves a comparative study designed to improve the abilities of automated morphology software packages to achieve similar results. The ability of automated software to accurately quantify morphological characteristics including particle size, aspect ratio, diameter, and circumference is an important tool in a nuclear forensic examination. Since these morphological parameters can be characteristic of material process history or origin, they are considered potential signatures of the nuclear material under investigation. However, further method development is required to ensure consistency between image analyses protocols and computational software packages. The four tasks of this on-going project include meetings to exchange procedures and plan the inter-laboratory comparison, the development of JAEA’s computational tool for quantification of particle images, automated particle analyses and comparisons between the JAEA-developed image analysis tool and the Morphological Analysis for Material Attribution software, developed at LANL and used by the U.S. National Laboratories, but also export-controlled. Included in this effort is the development of protocols for quantifying overall uncertainty of morphological measurements and general reporting. The ability to objectively describe and quantify particle samples using digital images and image analysis software is crucial for national and international nuclear forensic evaluations, and will provide the international nuclear forensics community with increasing capabilities for determining sample origin and process history through its morphological characteristics. This study will describe the results obtained so far by all three participating laboratories, and the progress that was made in spite of travel restrictions and interrupted lab access and activities.