Application of CR-39 plastic nuclear track detectors for quality assurance of MOX fuel pellet

Kodaira, Satoshi*; Yasuda, Nakahiro*; Hosogane, Tatsuya; Ishikawa, Fumitaka; Kageyama, Tomio ; Sato, Mitsuhiro

The plutonium-thermal use is expected as one of the approach for reuse of spent uranium fuel in nuclear power generation. On the other hand, many kinds of nuclides including Pu with extremely long half-lives are generated in the used fuels, which would be problems for storage and control of radioactive waste. The MOX (Mixed Oxide) consisting of plutonium dioxide enriched with 4-9% Pu and uranium oxide from spent uranium fuel would allow to reduce half-lives of radioactive waste significantly through the nuclear fission. The quality of MOX pellet depends on the homogeneous dispersion of Pu. The region of highly concentrated Pu is sometimes observed as "Pu spot" in the pellet, which has the potential of anomalous combustion localized at that region. The detection of Pu spot and evaluation of its size and concentration are one of the important quality assurance of MOX pellet for the safety use in the nuclear power plant. We have applied CR-39 plastic nuclear track detectors for the measurement of Pu spot inside MOX pellet. CR-39 can image a cross-section of MOX pellet by recording -particle tracks from Pu in the pellet, like autoradiography. The Pu spot is visibly imaged as a "black spot" due to the dense tracks compared to homogeneously dispersed region. Conventionally, the Pu spot measurement has been carried out with manual scanning, which takes much longer times and huge amount of human work. We have developed the automatic detection and measurement system of Pu spot recorded on CR-39 by the image processing with filtering and clustering algorithms. The detection efficiency with CR-39 is achieved to be almost 100% compared with conventional manual scanning result. It provides more information about the number, size and position of Pu spot.