NONDESTRUCTIVE ASSAY REFERENCE MATERIALS NEEDS SURVEY RESULTS

Throughout the Department of Energy (DOE) complex, nondestructive assay (NDA) measurements are becoming the measurement method of choice. NDA offers the best method to assay items that are not amenable to sampling and destructive assay methods. In addition, a good NDA measurement provides a relatively cost and resource effective value for accountable special nuclear material (SNM). It seems clear, as time goes on, more and more sites will rely on NDA as their primary accountability measurement. To perform the best possible NDA measurements, users require standards to calibrate their systems or to ensure that the systems continue to operate in an acceptable fashion. For many years, in the destructive assay arena, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the New Brunswick Laboratory (NBL), provided users with a wide variety of standards for most assay needs. Unfortunately, because of the uniqueness of the field of accountable NDA measurements and the high cost of producing NDA standards, there are currently a very limited number of these standards available. The starting point to addressing the issue of NDA standards is to discover the current state of NDA needs, requirements, and issues throughout the DOE complex. One of the responsibilities assigned to the Fissile Materials Assurance Working Group (FMAWG) by the Deputy Secretary of DOE is to “Monitor and prioritize DOE’s efforts to measure materials and ensure that materials are reflected on the inventory records.” As part of this effort, the FMAWG charged its Technical Solutions Subgroup and NBL with conducting a survey of the NDA reference materials needed for facilities to perform traceable nuclear material inventory measurements. The most cost-effective way of meeting these needs is to prepare NDA reference materials for use at several facilities. NBL sent the survey to all the DOE Operations Offices, to the MC&A groups at all the facilities and the actual NDA measurement experts at the facilities. Ten sites provided detailed answers to the survey (See Table 1). This paper summarizes the results of the NDA survey and discusses a few specific CRMs that NBL is developing.