Year
2004
Abstract
We will discuss the testing and operation of a system that produces multiple sets of equivalent data from a single gamma detector. Verification or inspection operations often involve measurements made by outside agencies in facilities where space is constrained. Such measurements often involve expensive detectors. In a production facility, the time involved in adding another measurement to a process can also be a burden. Often such facilities already employ detectors capable of making the necessary measurements; they may even use the detectors to perform the same measurement. The space, cost, and time problems would be reduced if the outside organization could use the signal from such an existing detector to obtain the necessary information. In this paper, we discuss the operation and testing of a signal splitting system that performs this task while providing both the host facility and the outside organization full confidence that the data are unaffected by the presence of the additional hardware gathering data from the detector. The specific system discussed in this paper is a gamma signal splitter that was designed in the Safeguards Science and Technology Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It has been operated and tested in a laboratory environment and is intended for installation in a production environment to gain additional experience with the system.