COMPARISON OF NDA AND DA MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES FOR EXCESS Pu POWDERS AT THE HANFORD SITE: OPERATOR AND IAEA EXPERIENCE

Quantitative physical measurements are necessary components of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) nuclear material safeguards verification regime. In December 1994, IAEA safeguards were initiated on an inventory of plutonium-bearing oxide and scrap items in Vault 3 of the 2736-Z Building of the Plutonium Finishing Plant on the United States Department of Energy's (USDOE) Hanford Site. The material originated in the United States nuclear weapons complex. The diversity of the chemical form and the heterogenous physical form of the plutonium in this inventory were expected to challenge the target precision and accuracy of methods employed by IAEA: quantitative destructive analytical techniques (which are susceptible to sampling error) and quantitative coincident neutron measurements (which rely on knowledge of the material's chemical form and purity). Because of the diverse and heterogenous nature of plutonium-bearing scrap, plant operations increasingly have adopted calorimetric techniques both for item inventory measurements and for verification purposes. During the recent advent of IAEA safeguards at Vault 3, a set of destructive and nondestructive methods were applied to a number of inventory items (cans of plutonium-bearing powders) with widely ranging chemical purities. Results of these measurements, gathered by the operator's and IAEA's laboratories and instruments as well as by instruments from Pacific Northwest Laboratory and USDOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), are presented and statistically compared.