Year
1994
Abstract
The Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant is developing a Continuous Automated Vault Inventory System to address needs for the long-term storage of special nuclear material. A weight measurement system that has a low implementation cost and minimal maintenance requirements has been developed to provide for decreased costs and human exposures to radiation during physical inventories. When integrated with radiation monitors, the combined system will provide measurement of two attributes of special nuclear material in storage. Details on the recently developed system for continuous, automated weight measurements of containers using a sensor fabricated from a silicone rubber optical fiber. By multiplexing the sensor outputs through concentrator units that interface to a central computer, the weights of thousands of containers can be measured in approximately one hour. The weight measurement concept and instrumentation have been previously used for treaty verification, intrusion detection, and vehicle weighing applications, and can be extended to a variety of other safeguards and security applications.