The Material Inventory Nuclear Tracking Simulator (MINTs) is a discrete event simulation software modeling the flow of material through a nuclear fuel cycle, modeling material flow down to the individual item level. The simulation currently includes functionality for pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) fuel cycles, light water reactor (LWR) fuel cycles, and Prismatic High-Temperature Reactor (HTR) fuel cycles.
The MINTs software can be installed as a python package by navigating to the mints directory and running pip install -e.
The notebook MINTs_Demo.ipynb provides a high-level guide to getting started with MINTs, and our full documentation can be found on Read the Docs.
Safeguards implementation planning requires a deep understanding of the material flow within a fuel cycle. This can be facilitated by nuclear fuel cycle simulation. For forward-planning safeguards implementations for reactors not yet in operations, it is especially key to understand material flow at the item, stratum, facility, and fuel cycle scales to best-implement safeguards. However, with a lack of historical safeguards-relevant information, simulation becomes a critical (and sometimes the only) tool available for planning. The Material Inventory and Nuclear Tracking simulator (MINTs) is a discrete event simulator designed to simulate nuclear material flow across a nuclear fuel cycle at the item, stratum, facility, and whole-cycle scale.
Further details can be found in our publication at the 2025 Advances in Nuclear Nonproliferation Technology and Policy Conference: Link will be added once available.
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