Review of Geological Traceability of Uranium Ore Concentrate in Nuclear Forensics

In the nearly three decades since nuclear forensic research was carried out in the early 1990s, nuclear forensics made significant progress in analytical methods, data processing, and traceability. Sr and Nd isotope abundances, the element content of some impurities, etc. can be used as effective geographic traceability fingerprint information. The geological traceability of uranium ore concentrates (UOC) needs to be combined with geochemical knowledge to find characteristic fingerprint information and combined with data processing techniques such as multivariate statistics to trace the origin of unknown UOC samples. Based on recent research results, a detailed discussion was made in this paper on the geological traceability of UOC nuclear forensics, including the classification of geographical traceability characteristics, the influence of uranium mining and smelting process on characteristics and traceability cases, etc., to promote the geological traceability study in UOC nuclear forensics.