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Why should safeguards by design be a global effort?
Jeremy Whitlock
I can’t think of a more exciting time to be working in nuclear, with the diversity of advanced reactor development and increasing global support for nuclear in sustainable energy planning. But we can’t lose sight of the need to plan for efficient international safeguards at the same time.
Global nuclear deployment has been underpinned since 1970 by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), making it a key customer requirement for governments to demonstrate unequivocally that the technology is not being misused for weapons development.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has helped verify this commitment for more than 50 years, but it has never safeguarded many of the advanced reactors (and related fuel cycle processes) being developed today.
B. S. Sandhu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 118-123
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12279
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The objective of this work is to present a method/technique for the determination of the effective atomic number (Zeff) of composite materials [mixed materials of many atomic numbers (Z's)]. In the present measurements, an intense beam of gamma-ray photons irradiates targets of different elements and composite materials and of varying thicknesses. The scattered radiations are detected by a properly shielded NaI(Tl) scintillation detector whose response unfolding, converting the observed pulse-height distribution to a true photon spectrum, is obtained with the help of an inverse matrix approach. This also results in the extraction of the numbers of multiple-scattered events from the thick targets. We observe that the numbers of multiple-scattered events, having the same energy as in single-scattered distribution, increase with an increase in target thickness and then saturate for a particular target thickness known as saturation thickness (depth). The saturation thickness is found to decrease when the Z of pure elements increases. A calibration curve (saturation depth versus Z of pure elements) and the measured saturation thickness values for composite materials are used to assign the respective Zeff values of these composite materials. Monte Carlo calculations also support the present experimental results.