Lead Slowing Down Spectrometer FY2013 Annual Report

Executive Summary The Lead Slowing Down Spectrometry (LSDS) project, funded by the Materials Protection And Control Technology campaign, has been evaluating the feasibility of using LSDS techniques to assay fissile isotopes in used nuclear fuel assemblies. The approach has the potential to provide considerable improvement in the assay of fissile isotopic masses in fuel assemblies compared to other non-destructive techniques in a direct and independent manner. This report is a high level summary of the progress completed in FY2013. This progress included: • Fabrication of a 4He scintillator detector to detect fast neutrons in the LSDS operating environment. Testing of the detector will be conducted in FY2014. • Design of a large area 232Th fission chamber. • Analysis using the Los Alamos National Laboratory perturbation model estimated the required number of neutrons for an LSDS measurement to be 10 to the 16th source neutrons. • Application of the algorithms developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to LSDS measurement data of various fissile samples conducted in 2012. The results concluded that the 235U could be measured to 2.7% and the 239Pu could be measured to 6.3%. Significant effort is yet needed to demonstrate the applicability of these algorithms for used-fuel assemblies,more » but the results reported here are encouraging in demonstrating that we are making progress toward that goal. • Development and cost-analysis of a research plan for the next critical demonstration measurements. The plan suggests measurements on fresh fuel sub assemblies as a means to experimentally test self-attenuation and the use of fresh mixed-oxide fuel as a means to test simultaneous measurement of 235U and 239Pu.« less