Year
2013
Abstract
The need to find a replacement neutron detector for the widely used 3He proportional tube has resulted in a number of new technologies, as well as improvements to more mature ones. These developments have, for the most, part been focused on the requirements of single-application areas, such as portal monitoring, well logging, or nuclear safeguards. A significant effort has been expended on various forms of the boron-lined proportional detector as a replacement technology in safeguards applications. The most substantial performance differences between the various boron-lined detectors under development are the geometric arrangement, packing density, and thickness of the boron coatings. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory we have modeled the impact of these differences on measurement performance in coincidence counting for several possible geometric configurations to identify an optimized configuration for each. Some results of this modeling campaign are presented along with an assessment of the safeguards assay application space addressable by an ideal boron-lined detector module.