Inertial-Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) Fusion Neutron Sources for Highly Enriched Uranium Detection

Detecting shielded highly enriched uranium (HEU) and other special nuclear materials (SNM) remains elusive. The research reported here combines multi-dimensional neutron sources, computational modeling of neutron transport, and principal component analysis of detector signals. The project's objective is to provide a high sensitivity technique for detecting HEU and SNM. An overview of the project will be presented, and progress will be described in: (1) developing optimized, adaptive-geometry, inertial-electrostatic confinement neutron source configurations with neutron pulses distributed in space and/or phased in time, (2) performing related Monte Carlo calculations of neutron transport through idealized cargo container models, and (3) applying sparse data algorithms, such as principal component analysis (PCA), to enhance detection fidelity.