Gamma Attribute Measurements - Pu300, Pu600, Pu900 [electronic resource].

Published: Washington, D.C : United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs, 2000.
Oak Ridge, Tenn. : Distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Physical Description: 512 Kilobytes pages : digital, PDF file
Additional Creators: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, United States. Department of Energy. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs, and United States. Department of Energy. Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Access Online

www.osti.gov

Availability

Finding items...

Restrictions on Access

Free-to-read Unrestricted online access

Summary

Gamma rays are ideal probes for the determination of information about the special nuclear material that is in the transparency regime. Gamma rays are good probes because they interact relatively weakly with the containers that surround the SNM under investigation. In addition, gamma rays carry a great deal of information about the material under investigation. We have leveraged these two characteristics to develop three technologies that have proven useful for the measurements of various attributes of plutonium. These technologies are Pu-300, Pu-600 and Pu-900. These technologies obtain the age, isotopics and presence/absence of oxide of a plutonium sample, respectively. Pu-300 obtains the time since the last ²⁴¹Am separation for a sample of plutonium. This is accomplished by looking at the ²⁴¹Am/²⁴¹pu ratio in the energy region from 330-350 keV, hence the name Pu-300. Pu-600 determines the isotopics of the plutonium sample under consideration. More specifically, it determines the ²⁴°Pu/²³⁹Pu ratio to determine if the plutonium sample is of weapons quality or not. This analysis is carded out in the energy region from 630-670 keV. Pu-900 determines the absence of PuO₂ by searching for a peak at 870.7 keV. If this peak is absent then there is no oxide in the sample. This peak arises from the de-excitation of the first excited state of ¹⁷O. The assumption being made is that this state is populated by means of the ¹⁷O(α,α′) reaction. The first excited state of ¹⁷O could also be populated by means of the ¹⁴N(α,p) reaction, which might indicate that this is not a good signature for the absence of PuO₂, however in the samples we have measured this peak is visible in oxide samples and is absent in other samples. In this paper we will discuss the physics details of these technologies and also present results of various measurements.

Report Numbers

E 1.99:ucrl-jc-139448
ucrl-jc-139448

Subject(s)

Other Subject(s)

Note

Published through SciTech Connect.
06/29/2000.
"ucrl-jc-139448"
41st Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management, New Orleans, LA (US), 07/15/2000--07/20/2000.
Luke, S.J.; Archer, D.E.

Funding Information

W-7405-Eng-48

View MARC record | catkey: 14400097