United States has maintained an advanced nuclear forensics capability to identify the origin, source, and history of nuclear devices in case of a nuclear terrorism attack and other kinds of nuclear detonations. Accidents involving nuclear weapons, always pose a significant risk of allowing particles composed of nuclear materials to enter the environment. While remediation has been conducted numerous times, fuel particles still remain in the soil, providing scientist’s samples that can be used to analyze how the fuel changed over time and move through the environment. These particles often differ in characteristics and can be of greatly varying sizes; some are large enough to see with the naked eye and others are so small that they pose a substantial inhalation risk. This work highlights development of a specialized particle mounting technique as well as utilizing NDE techniques such as gamma spectroscopy X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) and Scanning Electron Microscopy/Energy Dispersive X-Ray Spectroscopy (SEM/EDS) to characterize the non-critical nuclear weapon accident debris of sub-100 micron sizes, which underwent both morphological and elemental characterization. Morphological trends indicated particles across the four evaluated size distributions had similar circularity, and while three major particle classes present based on shape, angularity, and surface features were observed. Elemental analysis indicated the presence of uranium in all the actinide bearing particles and identified trends of other major and trace elements within these particles<i>.</i>

Characterization of non-critical weapon accident debris

ACS Fall 2021

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