Verification of nuclear fuel plates by a developed non-destructive assay method

Nuclear material (NM) verification is a main target for NM accounting and control. In this work a new relative non-destructive assay technique has been developed to verify the uranium mass content in nuclear fuel. The technique uses a planar high-resolution germanium gamma ray spectrometer in combination with the MCNP-4B Monte Carlo transport code. A standard NM sample was used to simulate the assayed NM and to determine the average intrinsic full energy peak efficiency of the detector for assayed configuration. The developed technique was found to be capable of verifying the operator declarations with an average accuracy of about 2.8% within a precision of better than 4%.