Development of eXternal Nuclear Reaction Analysis (XNRA) Detection Technique for Quantifying Light Isotope Concentrations

Technical Report · Tue Oct 01 04:00:00 EDT 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1571550· OSTI ID:1571550

Doyle, Barney L. ^[1]

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1. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Tritium Sustainment Program is responsible for the design, development, demonstration, testing, analysis, and characterization of tritium-producing burnable absorber rods (TPBARs) and their components used to produce tritium for the nation’s strategic stockpile. The FY19 call for proposals included the specific basic science research topic, “Demonstration and evaluation of advanced characterization methods, particularly for quantifying the concentration of light isotopes (¹H, ³H, ³He, and ⁴He, ⁶Li and ⁷Li) in metal or ceramic matrices”. Last year the same language appeared in the call for proposals, and a project IWO-389859 was awarded to the Ion Beam Lab (IBL) at Sandia-NM which was successful using Elastic Recoil Detection, but in the future could have resulted in tritium contamination that jeopardized other equally important NNSA projects. An alternative approach using deuterium nuclear reaction analysis was proposed and funded in FY2019 which was also successful and eliminated any possibility of contaminating the Ion Beam Laboratory with tritium, and will be described in this report.

• Research Organization: Sandia National Laboratories (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
• DOE Contract Number: AC04-94AL85000
• OSTI ID: 1571550
• Report Number(s): SAND--2019-12626; 680458
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY