Structural fingerprints of containers with nuclear materials for material control and accounting purposes

The Government of the Russian Federation has intention to develop nuclear energy and involve in the fuel cycle additional amount of fissile materials. In theory it could lead to increasing activities of terrorist´s groups by using nuclear materials as an object for blackmailing. The governmental system of nuclear material control and accounting was dedicated to prevent alike scenarios. Unfortunately, this continuously improving system still has some dark spots. One of those is possibility of unique seals faking. According to official ROSATOM guidelines for applying sealing technologies: “...there is no official data concerning sealing systems that could not be faked...”. At the same time, G8 states propose “3S (safety, security, safeguards)” initiative during 34th G8 summit, the main idea is to unite methods by using different “S” areas. Within this initiative TOLMI has launched the project on NDT methods application for fingerprinting by structural features of containers with nuclear materials. Nowadays, NDT is mainly focused on safety purposes, but it seems possible to apply these methods for providing national and IAEA safeguards. The microstructure of the containers material as well as of the dedicated weld seam applied to the lid and the container body provides a unique fingerprint of the full container, which can be reproducibly scanned using an appropriate technique. Weld seams investigation performed by ultrasonic backscattering technique for providing those fingerprints is described in the paper.