Year
1995
Abstract
Drums of uranium waste should be disposed of in an economical and environmentally sound manner. The most accurate possible assays of the uranium masses in the drums are required for proper disposal. The accuracies of assays from a shuffler are affected by the type of matrix material in the drums. Non-hydrogenous matrices have little effect on neutron transport and accuracies are very good. If self-shielding is known to be a minor problem, good accuracies are also obtained with hydrogenous matrices when a polyethylene sleeve is placed around the drums. But for those cases where selfshielding may be a problem, matrices are hydrogenous, and uranium distributions are non-uniform throughout the drums, the accuracies are degraded. They can be greatly improved by determining the distributions of the uranium and then applying correction factors based on the distributions. This paper describes a technique for determining uranium distributions by using the neutron count rates in detector banks around the waste drum and solving a set of overdetermined linear equations. Other approaches were studied to determine the distributions and are described briefly. Implementation of this correction is anticipated on an existing shuffler next year.