Year
1987
Abstract
In-line plutonium isotopic analysis of gaseous plutonium hexafluoride (PuFg) is very important for process control and special nuclear material accountability in any plutonium isotope separation process that requires a gaseous phase. Although much effort had been devoted to analyze arbitrary plutonium samples, no isotopic analysis had been done on gaseous PuFg samples. We have initiated a study on the use of a high-resolution, gammaray spectroscopy technique to analyze gaseous plutonium hexafluoride. For the first time, PuFg gas samples with pressures varying from 0.15 to 31 torr, which were directly fed into a gas cell from a process flow loop, were measured. The isotopic results of these measurements of gaseous PuFg agree very well with those of mass spectrometry measurements of solid PuF4. The precision of a 10-min measurement of a 10-torr reactor-grade PuFg is 1.5% for 238Pu, 0.22% for 239Pu, 0.87% for 240Pu, and 17.5% for 241Pu.