Year
1990
Abstract
It is becoming increasingly more difficult and expensive for safeguards authorities to transport solution samples from inspected facilities to laboratories for analysis. We have developed a transportable x-ray fluorescence analysis (XRFA) instrument that can assay plutonium and uranium solutions in glove boxes without any modifications to the glove box. This instrument will reduce the need to transport plutonium solution samples for analysis, thus saving time and reducing costs in inspection efforts. The system utilizes a portable high-purity germanium detector, transportable pulseprocessing electronics, and a portable IBMcompatible computer. The measurement head of our instrument is placed inside a glove-box glove. Inside the glove box a hollow cylinder is held in place by the measurement head with the glove partially surrounding it, then solutions contained in 15-mL polystyrene test tubes are inserted into the cylinder for assay by XRFA. The radioisotope 57Co is used to excite the uranium and plutonium Kseries x rays, and a combined 57Co and 153Gd source is used for transmission measurements to correct the observed x-ray intensity for sample selfattenuation effects. We have tested and evaluated the instrument at the European Institute for Transuranium Elements and demonstrated that 1% accuracies are achievable using eight uranium and seven plutonium reference solutions ranging in concentration from 50 to 411 g/L and 50 to 303 g/L, respectively.