Nuclear proliferomics: A new field of study to identify signatures of nuclear materials as demonstrated on alpha-UO.

The use of a limited set of signatures in nuclear forensics and nuclear safeguards may reduce the discriminating power for identifying unknown nuclear materials, or for verifying processing at existing facilities. Nuclear proliferomics is a proposed new field of study that advocates for the acquisition of large databases of nuclear material properties from a variety of analytical techniques. As demonstrated on a common uranium trioxide polymorph, α-UO, in this paper, nuclear proliferomics increases the ability to improve confidence in identifying the processing history of nuclear materials.