How and why quantifying plutonium ? (White paper)
Date : - Catégories : Setsafe News
For any nuclear facility, managing inventories or quantities of radioactive materials and waste is a major challenge, with multiple aspects: protection of workers and the population against ionizing radiation hazards, valorization of this inventory through economic development, risk mitigation of loss, theft, or detour of these materials and waste for hostile purposes, and limitation of the constraints imposed on future generations.
Cover picture : SAL Plutonium Lab – Photo Credit: Dean Calma / IAEA – licence CC BY-SA 2.0.
Learn all about plutonium
What are the opportunities and challenges of quantifying plutonium? How to characterize this radiactive material ? What techniques to use to be as reliable as possible ? etc… Answer all these questions with our white paper.
Calorimetry, the ideal technique to measure and quantify plutonium ?
Calorimetry is a technique based on the measurement of heat released by a package of radioactive material or waste. It is known to be very reliable, particularly for characterizing plutonium, tritium or americium-241.
It has indeed interesting advantages for these measurements:
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Non-destructive
The measurement is non-destructive and performed on the whole container, so it is representative.
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Precise
Calorimetry allows measurement accuracies of plutonium quantities down to 0.1% when applied to concentrated homogeneous materials. It is considered to be the most reliable of all nondestructive plutonium analysis techniques.
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Adaptable
Calorimetry can be used on any type of matrix or material, because its measurement results are not influenced by them.
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Reliable
Calorimetric measurement does not depend on object geometry or the chemical form of the radioelement.
