Analysis on Enrichment and Mass of Uranium Materials With Time-Correlated Measurement
Abstract Effective determination for enrichment of the uranium materials in heavy shielding is technically difficult to solve. Various technical methods so far have been proposed to deal with this problem. With the time-correlated coincidence measurement method, 14 MeV neutrons and fission spectrum neutrons are chosen to interrogate the uranium samples with different masses and enrichments. The fission spectrum neutrons are obtained by slowing down the 14 MeV neutrons. Results have shown that a good linear relationship exists between masses of the uranium materials (⩽10% enriched 235U) that possess the same enrichment. A linear relationship also exists between enrichments of the uranium materials that possess the same mass.
Time-correlated pulse-height measurements of low-multiplying nuclear materials
Abstract Methods for the determination of the subcritical neutron multiplication of nuclear materials are of interest in the field of nuclear nonproliferation and safeguards. A series of measurements were performed at the Joint Research Center facility in Ispra, Italy to investigate the possibility of using a time-correlated pulse-height (TCPH) analysis to estimate the sub-critical multiplication of nuclear material. The objective of the measurements was to evaluate the effectiveness of this technique, and to benchmark the simulation capabilities of MCNPX-PoliMi/MPPost. In this campaign, two low-multiplication samples were measured: a 1-kg mixed oxide (MOX) powder sample and several low-mass plutonium–gallium (PuGa) disks. The measured results demonstrated that the sensitivity of the TCPH technique could not clearly distinguish samples with very-low levels of multiplication. However, the simulated TCPH distributions agree well with the measured data, within 12% for all cases, validating the simulation capabilities of MCNPX-PoliMi/MPPost. To investigate the potential of the TCPH method for identifying high-multiplication samples, the validated MCNPX-PoliMi/MPPost codes were used to simulate sources of higher multiplications. Lastly, a characterization metric, the cumulative region integral (CRI), was introduced to estimate the level of multiplication in a source. However, this response was shown to be insensitive over the range of multiplications of interest.
Proposed beam diagnostics instrumentation for the LANSCE refurbishment project
Presently, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is in the process of planning a refurbishment of various subsystems within its Los Alamos Neutron Science Center accelerator facility. A part of this LANSCE facility refurbishment will include some replacement of and improvement to existing older beam-diagnostics instrumentation. While plans are still being discussed, some instrumentation that is under improvement or replacement consideration are beam phase and position measurements within the 805-MHz side-coupled cavity linac, slow wire profile measurements, typically known as wire scanners, and possibly additional installation of fast ionization-chamber loss monitors. This paper will briefly describe the requirements for these beam measurements, what we have done thus far to answer these requirements, and some of the technical issues related to the implementation of the instrumentation.