Impact of Monoenergetic Photon Sources on Nonproliferation Applications Final Report

Technical Report · Wed Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1376659· OSTI ID:1376659

Geddes, Cameron ^[1]; Ludewigt, Bernhard ^[1]; Valentine, John ^[1]; Quiter, Brian ^[1]; Descalle, Marie-Anne ^[2]; Warren, Glen ^[3]; Kinlaw, Matt ^[4]; Thompson, Scott ^[4]; Chichester, David ^[4]; Miller, Cameron ^[5]; Pozzi, Sara ^[5]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
2. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
3. Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
4. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
5. Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)

Near-monoenergetic photon sources (MPSs) have the potential to improve sensitivity at greatly reduced dose in existing applications and enable new capabilities in other applications, particularly where passive signatures do not penetrate or are insufficiently accurate. MPS advantages include the ability to select energy, energy spread, flux, and pulse structures to deliver only the photons needed for the application, while suppressing extraneous dose and background. Some MPSs also offer narrow angular divergence photon beams which can target dose and/or mitigate scattering contributions to image contrast degradation. Current bremsstrahlung photon sources (e.g., linacs and betatrons) produce photons over a broad range of energies, thus delivering unnecessary dose that in some cases also interferes with the signature to be detected and/or restricts operations. Current sources must be collimated (reducing flux) to generate narrow divergence beams. While MPSs can in principle resolve these issues, they remain at relatively low TRL status. Candidate MPS technologies for nonproliferation applications are now being developed, each of which has different properties (e.g. broad vs. narrow angular divergence). Within each technology, source parameters trade off against one another (e.g. flux vs. energy spread), representing a large operation space. This report describes a broad survey of potential applications, identification of high priority applications, and detailed simulations addressing those priority applications. Requirements were derived for each application, and analysis and simulations were conducted to define MPS parameters that deliver benefit. The results can inform targeting of MPS development to deliver strong impact relative to current systems.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1376659
• Report Number(s): INL/EXT--17-41137
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
BETATRONS
BREMSSTRAHLUNG
nonproliferation
nuclear physics
particle accelerator
PHOTON BEAMS
PHOTONS
photonuclear
PROLIFERATION