Development of Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) for Safeguards Applications

Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) is a highly configurable technique for elemental identification that has been applied to a wide variety of scientific and industrial applications for the past 20 years. Under the auspices of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI), we have been exploring the use of the LIBS technique for safeguards applications. We have developed a userfriendly man-portable LIBS platform to characterize samples (both in situ and remotely) across a wide range of the elements in the periodic table from hydrogen up to heavy elements like uranium and plutonium. As part of this work, we are also developing a LIBS platform capable of deployment in harsh facility environments such as hot cells and gloveboxes that can provide relative actinide compositions of process streams (for example, Cm/Pu and Cm/U ratios) as well as an inspector-deployable platform that can perform elemental and isotopic analyses of samples with microscopic quantities of uranium and plutonium. Analysis of the containment system and parts for SNM facilities and processes (alloys, metals, etc.) can also be obtained using this system.