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Title: Plutonium isotopic determination from gamma-ray spectra

Conference ·
OSTI ID:319613

The use of low- and medium-resolution room-temperature detectors for the nondestructive assay of nuclear materials has widespread applications to the safeguarding of nuclear materials. The challenge to using these detectors is the inherent difficulty of the spectral analysis to determine the amount of specific nuclear materials in the measured samples. This is especially true for extracting plutonium isotopic content from low- and medium-resolution spectral lines that are not well resolved. In this paper, neural networks trained by stochastic and singular value decomposition algorithms are applied to retrieve the plutonium isotopic content from a simulated NaI spectra. The simulated sample consists of isotopes {sup 238}Pu, {sup 239}Pu, {sup 240}Pu, {sup 241}Pu, {sup 242}Pu, and {sup 241}Am. It is demonstrated that the neutral network optimized by singular value decomposition (SVD) and stochastic training algorithms is capable of estimating plutonium content consistently resulting in an average error much smaller than the error previously reported.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Administration, Washington, DC (United States)
DOE Contract Number:
W-7405-ENG-36
OSTI ID:
319613
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-98-3093; CONF-980733-; ON: DE99001830; TRN: 99:003912
Resource Relation:
Conference: 39. Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM) annual meeting, Naples, FL (United States), 26-30 Jul 1998; Other Information: PBD: [1998]
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English