CONTAINER VERIFICATION USING OPTICALLY STIMULATED LUMINESCENCE

Containment verification is a high priority for safeguards containment and surveillance. Nuclear material containers, safeguards equipment cabinets, camera housings, and detector cable conduit are all vulnerable to tampering. Even with a high security seal on a lid or door, custom-built hinges and interfaces, and special colors and types of finishes, the surfaces of enclosures can be tampered with and any penetrations repaired and covered over. With today’s technology, these repairs would not be detected during a simple visual inspection. Several suggested solutions have been to develop complicated networks of wires, fiber-optic cables, lasers or other sensors that line the inside of a container and alarm when the network is disturbed. This results in an active system with real time evidence of tampering but is probably not practical for most safeguards applications. A more practical solution would be to use a passive approach where an additional security feature was added to surfaces that would consist of a special coating or paint applied to the container or enclosure. One type of coating would incorporate optically stimulated luminescent (OSL) material. OSL materials are phosphors that luminesce in proportion to the ionizing radiation dose when stimulated with the appropriate optical wavelengths. The OSL material fluoresces at a very specific wavelength when illuminated at another, very specific wavelength. The presence of the pre-irradiated OSL material in the coating is confirmed using a device that interrogates the surface of the enclosure using the appropriate optical wavelength band and then reads the resulting luminescence. The presence of the OSL material indicates that the integrity of the surface is intact. The coating itself could be transparent, which would allow the appearance of the container to remain unchanged or the OSL material could be incorporated into certain paints or epoxies used on various types of containers. The coating could be applied during manufacturing, before deployment, or even after the enclosure is already in the field. This paper presents some preliminary investigations into the use of OSL as an inexpensive, easy to implement, containment verification technique.