Study of the neutron multiplication effect in an active neutron method

ABSTRACT The neutron multiplication effect appears when an item contains large amounts of nuclear material. The neutron multiplication effect in this paper means the effect of subsequent fission reactions which are caused by fission neutrons produced by interrogation neutrons from a neutron generator. The previous active neutron method could not distinguish between first-fission and subsequent-fission neutrons and might overestimate the amount of nuclear material. However, the neutron multiplication effect in the active neutron method has not been adequately investigated. We discuss the evaluation method of the multiplication effect in the fast neutron direct interrogation method, one of the active neutron methods, using simulations with the Monte Carlo code MVP and experiments involving uranium waste drums. The first-generation neutrons from an external neutron source generate fission neutrons called second-generation neutrons, the second-generation neutrons generate third-generation neutrons, and so on. This study supposes that the neutron multiplication effect is mainly caused by the third-generation neutrons under the condition that the fourth-generation neutrons are much fewer. This paper proposes a correction method for the neutron multiplication effect in the measured data.

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