Plutonium Immobilization Material Characterization: Milestone 1 Report - Initiate Design of Prototype Material Characterization System

摘要

The objective of this task is to analyze impure oxide materials exiting from front-end processing prior to storage for feed blending. There are three goals to be accomplished with this task: reduce reblending (currently projected at 7% with an optimized ordering of the incoming material streams), determine if impure feed prep operations are performing adequately, and reduce plant operating costs by replacing wetprep elemental analyses whether conducted in the immobilization facilityor in existing laboratories. An additional potential application is the analysis of blended oxide prior to first-stage UO2 and precursor addition. The first step of the task was to define the performance requirements for the analyses. In general the selected analytical methodneeds to determine the elemental constituents in oxide feed with sufficient accuracy to flag problematic levels of impurities. Specifically, this entails the measurement of a variety of elements, including low atomic number (Z) elements, in a heavy element matrix. Theselected technique should minimize sample preparation, waste generation,operator/technician exposure, and delays to plant processing operations.http:/ /www.llnl.gov/tid/lof/ documents/pdf/237050.pdf