Abstract
In the context of nuclear security, uranium ore concentrates (UOCs) play an important role: they are traded in large quantities and this makes their use “out of regulatory control” a possible scenario. Once an incident of illicit trafficking o f n uclear m aterial is detected, an understanding of its origin and production process is required; this implies the necessity to use analytical techniques able to measure characteristic parameters (e.g. physical, chemical, isotopic characteristics of the nuclear materials) which are referred to, in the field o f t he n uclear f orensics, a s signatures. The present study investigates the potential of image texture analysis (i.e. the angle measure technique), combined with the spectrophotometric determination of colours for the evaluation of the origin of several UOCs. The use of different multivariate statistical techniques allows the categorization of about 80 different samples into a few groups of UOCs powders, which makes this approach a promising method complementing the already established methods in nuclear forensics.
Highlights
T HE illicit trafficking of nuclear and other radioactive materials represents a potential threat to the citizens, efforts are required in order to deter, detect, investigate and prosecute their illicit movement
Incidents involving nuclear materials out of “regulatory control” in the last decades have raised the necessity to include the early stages of the nuclear fuel cycle in the nuclear forensics investigations; in this scenario increasing interest has been attributed to the uranium ore concentrates (UOCs)
Keegan and co-workers have supported their conclusion on an unknown UOC sample thanks to a visual comparison performed via scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with the powder of the Mary Kathleen uranium mine [9]; Ho Mer Lin [12] and Fongaro et al [13] have tested the potentiality of image texture analysis for the classification of 14 uranium ore concentrates characterised by different chemical compositions and production processes
Summary
T HE illicit trafficking of nuclear and other radioactive materials represents a potential threat to the citizens, efforts are required in order to deter, detect, investigate and prosecute their illicit movement. Incidents involving nuclear materials out of “regulatory control” in the last decades have raised the necessity to include the early stages of the nuclear fuel cycle in the nuclear forensics investigations; in this scenario increasing interest has been attributed to the uranium ore concentrates (UOCs) They are produced after milling, leaching and precipitating uranium. Keegan and co-workers have supported their conclusion on an unknown UOC sample thanks to a visual comparison performed via scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with the powder of the Mary Kathleen uranium mine [9]; Ho Mer Lin [12] and Fongaro et al [13] have tested the potentiality of image texture analysis for the classification of 14 uranium ore concentrates characterised by different chemical compositions and production processes. A further discrimination was obtained by applying the Angle Measure Technique (AMT) algorithm within two colour-groups of samples; this last approach represents the preliminary phase of the image texture classification within each colour-group for the entire batch of 79 samples
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