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arXiv · 2012.01554

Material Identification in Nuclear Waste Drums using Muon Scattering Tomography and Multivariate Analysis

M. J. Weekes·A. F. Alrheli·D. Barker·D. Kikoła·A. K. Kopp·M. Mhaidra·J. P. Stowell·L. F. Thompson·J. J. Velthuis
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Abstract

The use of muon scattering tomography for the non-invasive characterisation of nuclear waste is well established. We report here on the application of a combination of feature discriminators and multivariate analysis techniques to locate and identify materials in nuclear waste drums. After successful training and optimisation of the algorithms they are then tested on a range of material configurations to assess the system's performance and limitations. The system is able to correctly identify uranium, iron and lead objects on a ~few \text{cm} scale. The system's sensitivity to small uranium objects is also established as $0.90^{+0.07}_{-0.12}$, with a false positive rate of $0.12^{+0.12}_{-0.07}$.

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M. J. Weekes, A. F. Alrheli, D. Barker, D. Kikoła, A. K. Kopp, M. Mhaidra, J. P. Stowell, L. F. Thompson, J. J. Velthuis. 2020-11-24. Material Identification in Nuclear Waste Drums using Muon Scattering Tomography and Multivariate Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/16/05/p05007

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