Tomographic gamma scanning (TGS) to measure inhomogeneous nuclear material matrices from future fuel cycles.

摘要

Current methods for the non-destructive assay (NDA) of special nuclear materials (SNM) in 208-L drums can give assay errors of 100% or more when the drum matrix and/or radionuclide distribution is nonuniform. To address this problem, we have developed the tomographic-gamma-scanner (TGS) method for assaying heterogeneous drummed SNM. TGS improves on the well-established segmented-gamma-scanner (SGS) method by performing low-resolution tomographic emission and transmission scans on the drum, yielding coarse three-dimensional images of the matrix density and radionuclide distributions. The images are used to make accurate, point-to-point attenuation corrections. The TGS geometric counting efficiency is 60% that of a typical SGS device, allowing a TGS assay time of only 28 min per drum with a one-detector system. TGS may also be useful for non-destructive examination (NDE). Currently, TGS is the only practical method of imaging SNM in drums.