Year
2014
Abstract
Plutonium characterization is a critical aspect of safeguards operations of spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities. hiRX has the potential to provide accurate, rapid and direct quantification of plutonium in spent fuel reprocessing streams thereby decreasing the likelihood of a diversion. Over the last several years we have presented the development of hiRX demonstrating ex cellent sensitivity with detection limits around 600 pg of plutonium in a synthetic spent fuel matrix. This sensitivity offers a new level of accuracy and precision for direct plutonium quantification in spent fuel matrices on as little as 1 - 5 microliter s of sample. This work will highlight the preliminary results from a prototype hiRX instrument created for direct determination of Pu in nuclear spent fuel matrices. The data shows linear calibration over 4 orders of magnitude with a correlation coefficient of 0.9999. Uranium was present in the calibration solutions at a concentration ratio with Pu of over 100 (U:Pu). Precision and accuracy are shown to be less than 6 % for the calibration range from 0.05 to 5 g/L Pu. A polycarbonate sample cell provides a convenient yet disposable means to measure spent fuel samples with a total volume of 5 microliters. Comparisons with conventional micro X - ray fluorescence measurements will highlight the advantages of the hiRX approach to Pu characterization in spent nuclear fuel samples.