Determination of spent nuclear fuel assembly multiplication with the differential die-away self-interrogation instrument

Abstract We present a novel method for determining the multiplication of a spent nuclear fuel assembly with a Differential Die-Away Self-Interrogation (DDSI) instrument. The signal, which is primarily created by thermal neutrons, is measured with four 3 He detector banks surrounding a spent fuel assembly. The Rossi-alpha distribution (RAD) at early times reflects coincident events from single fissions as well as fission chains. Because of this fact, the early time domain contains information about both the fissile material and spontaneous fission material in the assembly being measured. A single exponential function fit to the early time domain of the RAD has a die-away time proportional to the spent fuel assembly (SFA) multiplication. This correlation was tested by simulating assay of 44 different SFAs with the DDSI instrument. The SFA multiplication was determined with a variance of 0.7%.