Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Uranium Enrichment Determination Using a New Analysis Code for the U XKα Region: HyperGam-U

  • Kim, Junhyuck (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Choi, Hee-Dong (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Park, Jongho (Nuclear Chemistry Research Division, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute)
  • Received : 2015.12.14
  • Accepted : 2016.01.28
  • Published : 2016.06.25
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Abstract

HyperGam-U was recently developed to determine uranium enrichment based on ${\gamma}$- and X-ray spectroscopy analysis. The $XK_{\alpha}$ region of the uranium spectrum contains 13 peaks for $^{235}U$ and $^{238}U$ and is used mainly for analysis. To describe the X-ray peaks, a Lorentzian broadened shape function was used, and methods were developed to reduce the number of fitting parameters for decomposing the strongly overlapping peaks using channel-energy, energy-width, and energy-efficiency calibration functions. For validation, eight certified reference material uranium samples covering uranium enrichments from 1% to 99% were measured using a high-resolution planar high-purity germanium detector and analyzed using the HyperGam-U code. When corrections for the attenuation and true coincidence summing were performed for the detection geometry in this experiment, the goodness of fit was improved by a few percent. The enrichment bias in this study did not exceed 2% compared with the certified values for all measured samples.

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