Method implementation for the determination of the production date of uranium-rich materials

Authors:

  • Petra Lagerkvist
  • Anna Vesterlund
  • Henrik Ramebäck

Publish date: 2015-10-22

Report number: FOI-R--4104--SE

Pages: 47

Written in: English

Keywords:

  • Production date
  • age determination
  • chemical separation
  • ICP-SFMS
  • alpha
  • spectrometry
  • uranium
  • thorium
  • memory effect
  • contamination
  • inter-laboratory
  • comparison
  • REIMEP-22

Abstract

One aim of nuclear forensics is to establish the origin of nuclear and other radioactive material out of regulatory control. For uranium, characteristics such as age, i.e. the time passed since last chemical separation, isotopic composition, chemical phases and morphology, can be used to discriminate between different materials and determine e.g. the production process and thus where the material may originate from. The content of 230Th is dependent on the age of a uranium material and the age can therefore be determined by measuring the 230Th/234U ratio. If the material is relatively young (that is the time since last separation is short) the 230Th content is low and therefore sensitive measurement techniques such as ICP-SFMS and alpha spectrometry are suitable for this application. The aim of this work was to set up and implement methods for the age determination of uranium-rich samples using the 230Th/234U chronometer with both ICP-SFMS and alpha spectrometry. The implemented method was used for uranium production date determination in the inter-comparison exercise REIMEP-22. The report shows that thorium measurements with ICP-SFMS are affected by memory effects, which need to be minimized in order to obtain stable measurement signals. In this work, it has shown that measuring thorium containing samples with alpha spectrometry may cause contamination of the detectors, which can aggravate following measurements. The reasons to the contamination of the alpha detectors are discussed. The results for FOI in the inter-comparison REIMEP-22 were in good agreement with reference values. The measured production dates were 2012-07-15 (19 days) and 2012- 06-26 (77 days) for ICP-SFMS and alpha spectrometry, respectively. The numbers within parentheses are the measurement uncertainty for k=2. The reference date for the inter-comparison sample was 2012-07-09 (7.8 days).