| Popis: |
The 321-M Reactor Fuel Fabrication facility was used to fabricate enriched uranium fuel assemblies, lithium-aluminum target tubes, neptunium assemblies, and miscellaneous components for the production reactors. It operated for 25 years. During this time, thousands of uranium-aluminum-alloy (U-Al) fuel tubes were produced. After the facility terminated operations in 1995, all of the easily accessible U-Al was removed from the building, and only residual amounts remained. The Analytical Development Section of SRTC was tasked to conduct the required assays of highly enriched uranium in the deactivation and decommissioning activities of the facility. In this report we demonstrate successful assay of thirteen 55gallon and 110-gallon drums in the far field transmission corrected point source acquisition configuration. Several of the drums were assayed using the commercial Q 2 instrument in both the direct mode and in the segmented gamma scanner mode adapted by SRTC in addition to the far field method described here. The 110-gallon drums would not fit into the Q 2 instrument, and so assay by the far field technique was necessary. While the far field transmission corrected method used for these drums is a straightforward technique, it was important to obtain comparison measurements between it and the Q 2 techniques to establish its accuracy for the 110-gallon overpack drums. |
