Nuclear Reference Materials and Analytics

The application of safeguards by the IAEA involves inter alia analytical measurements of so-called environmental samples taken during inspections to detect and verify the presence or absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities. This requires the development and advancement of advanced analytical techniques. To this end, the IAEA has expressed the need to develop new reference materials and standards ensuring the reliability of analyses as well as the high quality and credibility of safeguards verification.

In the framework of the German Member State Support Programme as well as dedicated cooperation arrangements between Forschungszentrum Jülich (IFN-2) and the IAEA’s Office of Safeguards Analytical Services (SGAS), recent activities have been focussing on:

• The production and characterisation of particles for quality assurance and quality control. The availability of monodisperse uranium-containing particles with well-defined properties such as size, density, elemental and isotopic composition is very limited so far. The safeguards laboratories at IFN-2 have developed these tailor-made reference materials for the IAEA since 2012. In 2019 and 2021 two batches of these reference particles were successfully certified according to the isotopic composition and the amount uranium per particle (for one of these batches). They are currently the only existing certified uranium oxide-based microparticulate reference material worldwide.
• The qualification of the Forschungszentrum Jülich (nominated by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in 2013) as a member of the IAEA Network of Analytical Laboratories for Safeguards (NWAL). In line with the above-mentioned achievements, the safeguards laboratories at Forschungszentrum Jülich were qualified in 2020 as the first NWAL member worldwide for the provision of particle reference materials for the IAEA. In this framework the IFN-2 have provided several batches of uranium oxide-based reference particles to the IAEA and its NWAL.