Year
2004
Abstract
In order to support the many on-going research and programmatic activities at Los Alamos’ Plutonium and Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) Facilities in as accurate, efficient, and cost-effective manner possible, every reasonable effort is made to equip the nondestructive assay (NDA) laboratories with the most modern and technologically advanced instrumentation available. Recently, new state-of-the-art tomographic gamma scanner (TGS) instruments were installed to replace aging and outmoded segmented gamma scanner (SGS) instruments. Through the implementation of a translation axis, in addition to the vertical and rotation axes of the SGS, the TGS technique is able to employ axial tomography to determine the spatial distribution and quantity of nuclear material using high-resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy. Because the attenuation matrix and source distributions are known more accurately than with the SGS technology, biases due to matrix and source distributions should be reduced. In principle, a single calibration should suffice for the determination of isotopic mass for a wide range of material and matrix types. A number of questions naturally arise concerning these purported advantages of the TGS. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is to understand how the TGS measurement results compare with those of a typical SGS on the same well-characterized standards differing in matrix and material type. To that end, the TGS operating parameters were optimized to assay 55-gallon drum waste identical to that measured by our SGS. The calibration and measurement results on these standards, placed in typical low-density waste matrices, are presented and discussed. These results should enable more confident use of the TGS as well as point the way toward even more studies to enable more effective employment of the new TGS technology.