ACCELERATOR-BASED APPROACH EXPERIMENTS FOR REMOTE IDENTIFICATION OF FISSIONABLE AND OTHER MATERIALS

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in studying possible methods for remote non-destructive material composition testing, for e xample, for cargo identification at transportation, neutron logging et c., by means of nuclear detection (D.R. Brown, T. Gozani, Nucl. Instr, and Meth. B 99 (1995) 753) Of current concern are the applications of pulsed fast neutron analysis in determining the composition of fissil e objects (I.I. Zaliubovskiy et al., Atomnaya Energia 74 (6) (1993) 49 73. In this paper the observed experimental results are discussed indi cating the possibility of practical realization of the method for remo te material identification. The approach is based on measuring gamma r ay spectra from an object to be examined after its irradiation with sh ort neutron pulses produced by an accelerator. The obtained time and e nergy gamma spectra are used for material inspection. The information is obtained by using time-of-flight (TOF) analysis between the acceler ator pulse and the arrival of gamma rays in NaI detectors located far enough from an object to be examined. The method seems to be the most effective for fissile materials identification. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.