DEVELOPMENT AND IMPROVEMENT OF MEHODS FOR CONTINIOUS DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS ON THE CONDITION OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL CASKS OF THE LONG-TERM DRY CASK STORAGE OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL

In 2017, the National Nuclear Center of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the US leading national laboratories – Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories, with the support of the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Kazakhstan and the Department of Energy of the United States of America, launched a project to automate collection, analysis and continuous monitoring of the cask condition of the long-term dry storage of spent nuclear fuel at the LTDS site.

Within the project, each storage facility is equipped with special detectors that collect and store necessary parameters in real time. Each such device is a low-power detector system consisting of a tube filled with He-3 with a preamplifier for neutron detection, a microcontroller-based data acquisition system, a GPS receiver for location and time synchronization, and a power supply unit.

Currently, data analysis and optimization of the system parameters has not yet been completed, however, preliminary data give evidence of correctness of the path that has been chosen and the prospects of IPOD system application to ensure the nuclear material non-proliferation. Considering that the Republic of Kazakhstan is one of the leaders in global actions in the field of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, we believe that continuing joint efforts with the US and other partners to improve the ensuring safeguards and non-proliferation is highly relevant nowadays. One of the results of the work will be the presentation of a report on the prospects for using this system at the annual conference held in August 2021 in Vienna, Austria by the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management (INMM) and the European Safeguards Research and Development Association (ESARDA).